


Whatever Is Realised

by TiggyMalvern



Series: De Profundis [5]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Domestic Fluff, M/M, Murder Husbands, Trust Issues, Yes again, not everything in Córdoba is rosy, you can assume that by now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-10-16 21:13:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 38,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10579587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiggyMalvern/pseuds/TiggyMalvern
Summary: Life in Argentina continues, and Will continues to evolve.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This will be the last fic in the _De Profundis_ series, and like the first, it's decided to be longer and plotty. Not that you can tell right away, because the first chapter was completely taken over by sex, but there's plot in the next one, I swear.  
> 

  


_The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed, marred, and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear, or reluctance. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right._  
\-- Oscar Wilde, _De Profundis_

  


He wakes up, and he remembers.

It will be today, or it will be tomorrow. The pattern’s clear enough by now.

He drags himself from the warmth of the bed, and the sleeping man beside him, and into the shower.

The dogs are delighted to see him, greeting him at the bottom of the stairs – it’s never too early for them – and he follows them out into the slight chill of the morning. They’re a mass of wagging tails and lolling tongues, enthusiastically distracting as they scramble by one another in the rush to catch the toys he throws, and he chases them across the grass between the trees until he can’t help but smile and laugh, despite what he knows. 

He comes back inside an hour later, breathing hard with the exertion, and the kitchen smells of breakfast and coffee. He has to smile at the man cooking there too, perfectly groomed in the midst of sticky bowls and heat and steam, because his life here is a good one. It’s only the world outside it that isn’t.

He’s adopted Hannibal’s ritual of not looking at his computer till mid-morning. It’s better to start the day with the dogs and with Hannibal, with great food and a dose of caffeine. It can’t be fixed, but it’s better. If he opens the laptop first, he has no appetite left.

He takes the dogs out again once breakfast is cleared away. They don’t really need it after their long early session, but it’s their routine, and they expect it. When he gets back, Hannibal’s still in the kitchen, baking something simple with fruit and pastry, warm and restorative scents that wrap Will firmly in the concept of ‘home’.

Hannibal didn’t go out to swim this morning. He can count just as well as Will can.

Will wipes off the dogs’ feet, takes a breath and holds it, and wakes his laptop from sleep mode.

The headlines scream at him, because it’s today.

He’s looking at the same photo from the last two weeks, the dark eyes and big smile of a skinny eleven-year-old who didn’t start his growth spurt yet. And he never will, because his body was found in the early hours of the morning. His identity hasn’t been officially released this soon, but everyone already knows it’s him, missing and then murdered, like the others.

Will stares at his screen, but what he sees is in his head. 

He feels no urge to go to the local police and offer his help. He couldn’t, of course; they would never talk to him or let him near evidence from a crime scene without knowing who he is, his background, but the issue isn’t that he can’t. It’s that he doesn’t want to.

He doesn’t have any need to. He sees a lot in what he reads, and more in the photos that leak onto the internet, the photos the old, established newspapers would never publish. He sees enough, and what he feels crushes him tight against the far boundaries of nausea, until he’s hunched beside the sink, his fingers clenched on its edges, muscles taut and shaking.

Hannibal moves to stand behind him, one hand resting on Will’s shoulder, his nose brushing Will’s ear with warm, slow breaths. 

Will anchors himself to the press of Hannibal’s fingers as the tension drops, tips his weight back against Hannibal’s body, reaches a hand over his shoulder to tangle into Hannibal’s hair. His empathy doesn’t need to look at Hannibal to feel it; he drifts into the surge of love that surrounds him with Hannibal’s arm wrapped around his waist, palm spread flat over his stomach, and all of the nausea washes away.

Hannibal waits, patient, allowing Will to relax fully before he speaks. “You want to kill him,” he says.

Will turns within Hannibal’s grasp to look at him. He’s lied to this man and to himself, so many times, and he nearly destroyed them both. “You know I do.”

Hannibal’s hand slides down Will’s arm and settles instead at his hip. “There’s nothing to stop us, Will. We can do whatever we like.”

They can. Unless Will has a reason not to, and he’s not even sure he wants to look for one.

Will has dreams sometimes about Dolarhyde, and they’re not nightmares. He doesn’t dream about being stabbed, and the pain. He dreams about the end – about Hannibal pulling the man’s head back, and Will dragging the blade through the soft, exposed parts of his body. He dreams about the blood running warm along his fingers and wrist, about Hannibal and himself drenched in it, and knowing each other, and loving each other for one intense, heady moment before the overwhelming truth of it swamped Will in so much self-knowledge that he chose the cliff.

He wakes from those dreams charged with the savagery of it, and he wraps himself around Hannibal and kisses his skin, dizzy with this love that he tried to destroy and can’t ever lose, and Hannibal stirs and turns and doesn’t ask, and they make love, close and clinging, until Will can sleep again.

Will curls his own fingers over Hannibal’s now, holding them against him. “I’m not sure what I want,” he says, and it’s still just barely true.

Hannibal smiles and rests his nose against Will’s cheek. “You will tell me when you do.”

Will knows he will, because they have no secrets now.

He drops his forehead to Hannibal’s shoulder, and closes his eyes. “Thank you,” he says quietly. ‘Love’ and ‘family’ are words that flow easily from Hannibal as obvious truths, but not from Will, even now.

Hannibal tilts his cheek against Will’s hair, and they’re standing like they did on that cliff. “Don’t ever leave me, Will.”

“You’d track me down and kill me if I did,” Will says mildly. He no longer cares to ignore or hide from the truth.

Hannibal’s arms tighten around him. “I’ll always find you,” he confirms. “I’m unclear if I would kill you.”

Will’s smile is crooked. “So you’d try to talk me into coming back first, then kill me when I still said no.” He’s not concerned by the knowledge that his lover will murder him if he gets angry enough; it’s been a two way issue in the past, and now it’s a pure hypothetical that won’t ever happen. 

“You’d fight back,” Hannibal says, giving it obvious consideration. “Perhaps you would be the one to kill me.”

“The last time you and I met with murderous intent, it didn’t turn out in my favour,” Will reminds him.

Hannibal’s lips curve into a smile against his ear. “Chiyoh put you at a disadvantage. I doubt I’d find it so easy without her.”

Will leans back far enough to look at him, and he lets the memory of that cold, vicious fury flood through his eyes, because Hannibal loves to see it in him. “Maybe you wouldn’t,” he says, and then he kisses him, because he hasn’t wanted to kill Hannibal in a very long time. He didn’t even want to kill him when he pulled them both from a cliff; he just hadn’t been ready to embrace _this._

That ‘this’ has turned out to be the source of a simple contentment and delight he hasn’t felt since he was a kid of maybe ten years old running wild in the bayou and fishing with his father is something of a surprise.

He’d known it would be intense with Hannibal; frantic, charged how the air between them always was, lightning about to strike, and sometimes it is, times when they mark each other with bruises in the ferocity of their desire. He’d thought he had to choose, between Hannibal’s wildfire and all the attending risk of burns, or someone like Molly, whose warmth was a gentle glow of comfort and ease. He’d never thought to hope that Hannibal might somehow offer both, and yet it’s here now, in this kiss in their kitchen with the sink against his back, when their lips brush and tease and they smile, and then press together again.

And this is one of the times when kissing Hannibal doesn’t stop, can’t stop, when it can only spread and make them lean into one another, and Will almost wants to laugh with it because he’s just so fucking _happy_. It’s ridiculous, being happy with this man, of all the people in the entire fucking world, but he’s too busy kissing to laugh, and the kissing lets him be everything that’s real, makes him lost inside himself, and inside Hannibal instead of anybody else, and Hannibal is Will anyway, so it’s all the same. 

Will’s brain has been slowly reshaping itself for years, laying down the pathways that enable him to think more like Hannibal, to more easily understand him. Will has never been oblivious to what was happening; it appalled him, while he was smiling and baiting traps and fantasising murder, the knowledge of how much of Hannibal he was simultaneously carving into himself. 

When he sought Hannibal across Europe, he stopped being appalled. It was practical, a useful tool to read Hannibal mentally and find him physically.

It’s an irrelevancy now, to what degree they were both unearthing the parts of Will always secreted away, and how much was the result of Will’s empathy spending prolonged periods in intimate contact with this one treasured killer. The outcome is the same. After Dolarhyde, Will could only embrace the changes in his head, the reforging of mental connections that allowed him to accept Hannibal fully into his life, and with it to accept the whole of himself. 

Will looks at Hannibal now, and it’s not that he doesn’t see what he is. He sees all of him. It just doesn’t matter. 

And when Will’s being starkly realistic, he thinks maybe that isn’t true; maybe it does matter. Because Will didn’t fall in love with his brilliant psychiatrist, and he didn’t fall in love with his gently concerned friend. He fell in love with Hannibal, and he knew exactly what he was. He knows him now, and he wants him now, and he disentangles their lips and leads Hannibal out of the kitchen, a room they both agree is no place for sex, Hannibal because his lair is the epitome of cleanliness and Will because it’s all hard surfaces and distractingly uncomfortable.

There’s a rug before the fireplace that wasn’t here when Will arrived. It hadn’t taken him long, this past winter, to notice that Hannibal enjoyed sex in its flickering warmth, and it’s almost summer and daylight now, but the rug is still thick and warm and soft under their bodies. They don’t need to undress as Will lies back into the deep, welcoming pile, just a simple parting of zippers and buttons to allow cloth to be pushed back from their waists, and Hannibal sinks to all fours above him, turned to face Will’s hips, because Hannibal knows Will, and how his desires change with his mood, and he understands what Will wants from him in this.

For Will, this act is the purest physical representation of what they are together, each of them bridging the gap to close the circuit between them, the two of them completing each other literally as well as figuratively. Oh, he _loves_ it when he presses himself deep into Hannibal, a world of hot skin and staring eyes, loves it too when he takes Hannibal inside his own body, where he’s been one way or another since he met him, but the clinging intensity of those times when they push each other right up against every boundary of themselves is different. This is slower, softer, sharing each other’s bodies like they share wine by the fire on winter evenings, the simple love of a daily life built around each other contrasted with the obsessive passion that lead them to stalking and murder attempts. 

It hasn’t gone anywhere, that compulsion to grab and own. It simply isn’t needed right now, and so it subsides, leaving Will to lick his way slowly along Hannibal’s erection and part his lips soft over the tip. He flattens his tongue over the ridge below the head and curls it there, alternately lapping and pressing, closes his eyes into the familiar sensations of Hannibal’s shape and sweet-salty flavour within his mouth, of his own hardness gathered into a welcoming, sucking heat.

It grounds his mind into the moment like nothing else can, his focus narrowed solely to the nerves in his cock, the movements of his own lips and tongue, and the pattern of Hannibal’s breath. He tracks the flow of air through his lover’s nose, the pace and depth of it steering Will’s actions, when to pull back and play and lick around him, when to suck him right down and feel his muscles tense under his fingers. He’s planning to edge Hannibal today, long and slow, but it’s damn hard to concentrate with Hannibal’s lips and tongue gliding wet on the head of his cock, with Hannibal’s thumb and forefinger gripped around him, moving with him, while his other fingers curl down to stroke over his balls, and god, that’s making him even harder. 

He lets his head drop back to the rug with a soft laugh. “You’re not playing fair.”

Hannibal’s mouth parts from Will’s cock with a soft, wet pop. “I believe ‘fair’ would be a very apt descriptor for what we’re doing, Will.” And when he stops talking, that wonderful, shifting heat is back surrounding Will, and pushing lower, and Will wriggles himself a little more comfortably into the rug, because Hannibal’s determined to make Will come first, and Will can happily go with the flow on that.

He’s not neglecting Hannibal, the cock close by his face already wet with his own saliva, but he’s keeping it low key now, just soft kisses and the long swipe of his tongue around the head, his fingers kneading the muscle of Hannibal’s thighs through the fabric while he sinks into the sensations of Hannibal’s mouth and hands on his own body. He can lose himself in this, boneless with the gentle licking and sucking, the fingers stroking rhythmic and light over the sensitive skin of his ass and his balls. Boneless until Hannibal draws back, teasing with breath slow and warm on the wet head of Will’s cock, encouraging Will to reach for it, and Will’s hips twitch upwards, a movement fast and then as quickly aborted, almost a spasm.

Hannibal never restrains Will while he does this. Like so many things between them, there’s the underlying ripple of competition, a trial of Hannibal’s teasing skill and knowledge of Will against Will’s self-control. And on those few occasions when Will crashes beyond it, when he grips tight into Hannibal’s hair or skin and fucks deep into his mouth and throat, Hannibal smiles satisfaction at him after, enthralled by Will’s use of force, by Will demanding and taking what he wants.

This isn’t going to be one of those times. Will knows where his lines are, he feels them when they shift, and right now that edge is settled a long ways back. He’s relaxed in this moment, somewhere beyond contentment, and he can just enjoy what Hannibal’s giving him, what Hannibal always gives him, because Hannibal’s made it his goal in life to ensure Will Graham gets everything he wants, even when Will was trying really fucking hard not to want it.

Will could beat Hannibal sometimes, once he understood what he was dealing with. He couldn’t beat both Hannibal and himself, when the two of them were aligned, not permanently.

They’re aligned now, and there’s nothing to object to, not in any of it, and definitely not in lying back while Hannibal sucks his cock, swallowing around him, working him with his tongue, enthusiastic and talented at making Will feel _amazing _. And of course, it builds and changes, it can’t stay that slow and sweet, the urgency rising through Will’s balls and his belly; it’s a reaching, seeking heat wanting more of Hannibal’s mouth and tongue and fingers, wanting more of him _always_ , their underlying magnetism distilled by sex into this raw insistence. And Hannibal’s not teasing today, not this time, his hands and his lips shaped to encourage Will’s desire, brightening the sparks in his head and the lust in his gut till he comes in a last, carnal rush and a flurry of harsh breaths. __

__He takes a moment, or five, maybe a minute, just to feel it, sprawled with the hairy tickle of the rug under his partly bared ass, one more soft drag of Hannibal’s lips over the head of Will’s cock when he kisses away the last of his come before he pulls back, because he knows how fast sensitivity becomes an issue for Will. He can drift in it, the wash of being wanted like this, loved like this, sunlit waves lapping gently round the edges of his mind in peace and delight._ _

__And then he stretches, drawing the energy back into his muscles and the sharpness back into his head. He smiles and says, “Now you’ve given me something to aim for,” because Will can concentrate fully without the distraction of his own need, can focus himself entirely on Hannibal._ _

__Hannibal angles his head around, lifts his eyebrow at Will, and says, “I’m very much looking forward to your efforts.”_ _

__Will’s going to answer that with actions, not words, because he’s already made his intention clear, and he grasps Hannibal’s cock and steers it to his own mouth once more, sliding past the flared head to suck over the ridge where it meets the shaft, his hand working the foreskin slow and easy. He has no real plans for today, neither of them do, and he’s not in any hurry. He can lie here, lazily enticing his lover and feeling his pleasure, for quite some time._ _

__Hannibal dips his hips an inch, sliding further, just a little further between Will’s lips, and Will tightens his fingers on the cloth over Hannibal’s thighs, drawing him down in silent, encouraging permission. He tilts his head back, straightening the line of his mouth and throat as Hannibal’s cock presses in, and Will swirls and plays his tongue around him, breathing deeper through his nose as another surge of Hannibal’s pre-come mingles with his own saliva, strengthening his taste, and Will never imagined he’d want this as much as he does._ _

__Will hadn’t ever thought of himself as truly bisexual, though he certainly wasn’t straight. Mostly he was attracted to women, fantasised about women, but every now and then he’d meet a man who made him hard. He found boxes and labels unhelpful, more so because he never seemed to fit them, and not just on matters of sexuality, but privately he tended to think of himself as ‘wavy’ – somewhere nebulous between straight and bi._ _

__As a young twenty-something with questionable social skills and a reputation for stand-offish-ness, Will Graham didn’t date a whole lot. But he was as horny as every other guy that age, and it was usually easier to find a man making himself available for a one night stand than a woman, so Will’s experiences became rather more bisexually skewed than his inclinations. He exchanged more than a few hand jobs and blow jobs in bathrooms and alleyways, rarely in a bed. He didn’t dislike sucking cock, though it wasn’t his first preference either – it was a reasonable trade in exchange for getting off in such an enjoyable way himself, and he applied himself to the science of it, a skill tailored to excite his partner and bring them to finish quickly._ _

__Hannibal was always one of those rare men who made Will hard, from very early in their acquaintance, and Will did exactly what he did with most people he was attracted to, of either gender – he recognised it, acknowledged it, and then ignored it. He’d learned too long ago that he wasn’t ‘dating material’, that his attempts at relationships were doomed to be short and often ended acrimoniously, and he wasn’t about to keep repeating that hopeless pattern through his late thirties._ _

__Will’s been delighted to discover now, in his early forties, that it really does make a difference whose cock he’s sucking, because Hannibal doesn’t just get him hard; he’s in love with Hannibal, fervently and demandingly, and it’s easy to want this, to enjoy having Hannibal push deep into his mouth, to thrill in giving him pleasure, and still more in controlling when he gets it._ _

__He takes his hand from Hannibal’s thigh, slides his thumb into his own mouth alongside Hannibal’s cock to wet it with a swirl of his tongue and flowing saliva. His fingers ease Hannibal’s cheeks apart, and he dips his thumb to his opening, sweeping a damp trail across it, light and tickling, the muscle quivering beneath his touch and Hannibal panting roughly down by his hips. “Will…” Hannibal speaks his name like it’s sex all by itself, voice deep and raw and heavy, and Will would smile if he could do that with his mouth stretched full and sucking. He presses his thumb to open him with just the tip, only to the base of his nail. Hannibal’s hands grip tighter above Will’s knees, his forearms tense alongside his thighs, and Hannibal’s about to lose the last of his words, his whole body taut and reaching, but he’s relaxing deliberately around Will, a conscious desire to let him in._ _

__Will pushes deeper into Hannibal, lifts and stretches his neck to pull Hannibal deeper inside himself; he hears the catch in Hannibal’s breath, sucks harder as Hannibal’s cock swells and spasms against his tongue and swallows eagerly around him when his mouth fills. There’s not much flavour for him this time, Hannibal too far into his throat for the fluid to reach his taste buds, and Will inhales the scent of him instead, the familiar musky sweat gathered against Hannibal’s balls, close by Will’s nose, and satisfaction pools languid through his belly along with his lover’s come._ _

__He tips his head back to the floor, exhaling slow, and Hannibal’s softening cock slips from his mouth to rest damp against his cheek. He eases his thumb gently from inside Hannibal, lets his arm flop to the rug, spread out like a starfish, and he’s smiling. “So did I make the grade, Doctor?”_ _

__Hannibal presses himself up onto his hands, and turns to straddle Will again, looking down at his face now, still breathing through parted lips, one palm curled to Will’s neck and ear. “I’ve studied art and beauty produced by a thousand years of humanity, and you are the most singular, exquisite experience I’ve found in this world, Will.” Hannibal says it with such honest sincerity that Will can only grin up at him, crooked and teasing._ _

__“Worth the wait?”_ _

__“Without question.” Hannibal’s lips curve into his small, genuine smile. “I had hoped to wait less than three years, but I was prepared to wait much longer.” He dips his head an inch closer, and the smile eases back. “I would wait forever, Will,” he says, and he _means_ it, and Will knows that in some ways he’s still waiting. _ _

__“Come here.” Will tugs at Hannibal’s supporting arm, persuading him down to lay on the rug, and he twists over onto his side, close against him. Their noses almost touch, Hannibal’s breath drifting warm across his cheek, and these moments between them are perfect – somehow both entirely natural and entirely amazing, one and the same, Will’s heart swollen so tight with the pressure of his love that he can barely believe it keeps beating. Impossible to express these feelings in clumsy, limited words, and he doesn’t try, his fingers brushing Hannibal’s hair from his forehead, sliding back and through to sweep a loose, greying strand behind his ear._ _

__Will had never believed he would find someone, someone who could be everything, who shaped themselves so easily to fit the gaps in Will’s life, mentally and physically. He thought someone like Alana, like Molly, was the best he could hope for; someone kind, who loved him, and allowed space for his differences, his oddities._ _

__And of course, when he found him, when that unhoped for person actually existed, _of course_ he was a serial killer, because life never gifted Will Graham with anything. It had to be a struggle, had to be torture both mental and physical, and it’s hard for Will to remember now why he fought it as long as he did, because once he freed himself to love, loving Hannibal is all-encompassing and there’s no guilt at all._ _

__Maybe it would have been different if he’d left with Hannibal and Abigail when he first wanted to. Maybe back then the self-recrimination would have been corrosive, would have destroyed the love until they finally destroyed each other._ _

__It would have been crazy then, to run away with a murderer whose infatuation might devolve into boredom within a year, leaving Will to feature only as another course at dinner. Hannibal had asked Will once if he needed a sacrifice, and it turns out that he honestly did – he’d needed something beyond a gesture, some proof that this was real from both sides, and Hannibal had given it twice over._ _

__Love is surprisingly simple and staggeringly complicated, and theirs somehow falls at the extreme end of both._ _

__It’s easy now, to lie here, nuzzling soft against the skin of Hannibal’s jaw, almost smooth at this morning hour, the barest hint of the stubble that will surface there later in the day. It has to be about the now, always, their past deliberately rejected and locked away, and no certainties in any future they can realistically plan for. So Will makes it about the now, about the joy in this simple touching, pressing his smiling lips to Hannibal’s chin and feeling Hannibal’s fingers stroke slow through his lengthening curls, and he indulges this most basic pleasure of immediacy, of having what he wants._ _

__Hannibal’s taught Will so much about what he wants, and none of it was anything he didn’t already know he wanted. Hannibal only taught him to accept his wants, to be open to his desires, and everything Will wants now is entangled with Hannibal._ _

__He wants _this_. He wants it exactly like this, peaceful, sprawled and sated, with love bottomless in the black, devoted depths of Hannibal’s eyes. But still Will dreams of Dolarhyde, because he has a greed that wants that other love too, the one that rages and burns, out-of-control destructive; he centres to that moment when he looked up at Hannibal over the corpse of a dragon, and the truth of it flared between them, everything twisting into place with one final snap._ _

__He doesn’t have to wait for his brain to complete the process of fusing their wants and needs, he knows that. He can choose it, and forge those final connections himself._ _

__Will smiles and reaches his fingers to stroke along the sunlit line of Hannibal’s cheek. “I want all of it,” he tells Hannibal, and Hannibal knows what he means, because that’s how they are._ _

__“You’ll have it.” The way Hannibal says it, it’s a promise, and the last sequestered piece of Will can relax, to stretch and bask in all this love from Hannibal, from within himself, because there are no decisions left to make._ _

__Will’s fingers curl to fit Hannibal’s skin once more, and he offers his own promise in return. “We both will.” It doesn’t need a kiss to seal it, but they’re moving together because they want it, and each other, always each other. It’s too soon and they’re too old to even think about sex again, but it’s still always each other, and fucking is only one tiny part of it._ _

__Hannibal liked touching Will from the start, as they moved from acquaintances into friendship. There was nothing intrusive or inappropriate about it, just a hand on Will’s arm or shoulder sometimes as they walked or talked. Will noticed it after Hannibal first tested him, first trusted him, when Will agreed to protect Hannibal and Abigail over Nicholas Boyle. When Will understood that certain people were more important to him than the law._ _

__He never changed his mind, about either the law, or the people._ _

__It wasn’t how Will behaved with his friends, the few that he had. The people who saw some way beneath Will’s surface were rare enough, and he wouldn’t weird out those who stayed around by making them wonder if he was hitting on them in some awkward, Will Graham way. But it wasn’t unwanted, and it wasn’t odd that Hannibal acted that way, Hannibal who was such an unusual combination of outwardly extroverted and yet deeply reserved._ _

__By the time Will acknowledged just how much he wanted to touch back, touching would have meant relinquishing any claim on sanity._ _

__Four years later, he touches every day, and it feels like the sanest thing he’s ever done._ _

__There are nails clicking on the tiles, and a cold nose presses wetly at his hairline. Will breaks from kissing Hannibal with a laugh and pushes Cody away, following up with a soft command of “Bed.” Cody gives Will his saddest face, before he turns and pads back to curl up with the others._ _

__Hannibal’s eyes follow the departing dog over Will’s shoulder. “Perhaps you could train the dogs to avoid the scent of sex,” he suggests._ _

__Will brushes a brief kiss over the tip of Hannibal’s nose. “Or we could stick to having sex upstairs, since they don’t go there.”_ _

__Hannibal’s wrinkles deepen just enough to make his disapproval clear. “That would place unfortunate limitations on our spontaneity.”_ _

__“So does your baking,” Will says, sniffing deliberately at the air. “I’m pretty sure your pie’s burning.” Hannibal must have been able to smell it passing its peak ten minutes ago, at least._ _

__Hannibal rolls up onto one elbow, the other hand brushing the hair gently across Will’s forehead. “I can make another one very much the same by lunchtime. You are entirely unique.”_ _

__Will hmmms in appreciation of the sentiment. “We should probably still go and rescue it, or the whole house will smell like it’s on fire for the rest of the day.”_ _

__Hannibal sighs and sits fully upright, his hands leaving Will to tuck himself back in and rearrange his clothing. “Perhaps you’re right.” He throws Will a sideways look with widened eyes. “I anticipate resuming our conversation later.”_ _

__“I don’t recall that we were having much of a conversation,” Will says with amusement, lifting his hips to tug his own jeans over his ass and zipping himself up._ _

__“All the more reason to resume it,” Hannibal says as he stands, and he offers Will his hand._ _

__Will smiles and takes it, hauling himself to his feet. Hannibal doesn’t let go as he turns towards the kitchen, and Will squeezes gently at his fingers, and walks with him into a life that’s changed, yet again._ _


	2. Chapter 2

It gets both easier and harder after that.

It’s easier, because now he has a pure focus, a clarity of vision unclouded by any lingering questions about himself. Harder, because before they can kill their murderer, Will first needs to find him, needs to immerse himself in the mind of a man who slaughters children, and track him through his thoughts.

He reads the official police statements, which tell him nothing, and every news article from every source, some of which are ridiculously inaccurate. He maps the locations of the bodies, the times of their abductions, the times they were found. He stares at the pictures online, all of them, soaking into himself every detail, and Hannibal is a constant presence to drag him back when he needs to get out. 

Mostly when he returns to himself, he’s enfolded in Hannibal, with hands stroking calm into his skin, words flowing golden honey smooth and thickly accented close to his ear. A few times, the grip on him is silent and wholly possessive, and he finds himself staring into the black eyes and antlers of the wendigo. It’s different, but it’s not surprising, and it’s not a problem, because the beast loves Will too, and that’s what he needs to take from it.

Hannibal was always the person best able to calm the fires in Will’s mind, even when he was the one stoking them. It’s hard to lose himself in anything outside the moment when Hannibal’s touching him, watching him, close around him; he’s imprinted on Will’s brain and it feels amazing to let him be there, to take one breath and plunge in to meet him, without knowing if they’re ever going to surface.

Hannibal will pull him back up to reach the air, every time, and that certainty is a safety net he never thought to have.

What he has doesn’t change his problem, because he can’t see it. Not all of it.

He mounts a Yagi on the roof so he can listen to the police band; they’re not exactly centrally located here, and he’d have as much luck listening from Wolf Trap. He picks up a lot of chatter, and not a lot of facts, at least not the kind he’s interested in.

Everything Will needs to know is in the police computer system, but his criminal skills don’t extend to hacking, or breaking into secure locations. He can steal a car, as long as it’s an older model, and he can pick a simple lock. Anything high tech is beyond him. 

Hannibal might know someone with those skills, or more likely how to contact someone who knows someone. He’s spent half his life as a covert felon, and he has no problems acquiring paperwork, or money from his array of accounts, scattered worldwide. There are networks out there that Hannibal has a way into.

Revealing themselves that way would be dangerous, and they don’t have enough time. The last victim was found nearly two weeks ago, and someone’s already preparing to snatch the next.

Will tries really fucking hard not to think about Walter; Walter who’s just that age, and he’s on a different continent and entirely safe (safe now he’s nowhere near Will, and Will doesn’t want those images in his head either), but trying has never stopped Will’s imagination from slipping into the impossible and the macabre.

He sees Walter flopped on the grass in a public park under a layer of dawn dew, blood clotted and dried all across the front of his baseball shirt. He sees him laid out on the mortuary table and exposed, his chest ravaged by four separate knife wounds. This killer isn’t like Hannibal; it isn’t torture, but he doesn’t have precision aim either, because he’s really not Hannibal, and he has to stab them multiple times before they stop breathing.

He sees Walter cowering back against the wall of a bare, starkly lit room, his face streaked in tears and eyes huge in panic; Will raises the knife and thrusts it deep into his body, feeling the catch and grate as it slides against a rib, and Walter shrieks, high-pitched and frantic, and he hears, “Will, be here with me, Will,” as fingers comb through his sweat-tangled curls, and his cheek is resting against the delicately soft shirt of a man whose touch is love, in a room that smells comfortingly of dogs.

Will breathes through the moments he needs to settle back into his own skin, to focus on this current reality, and then he steps out of Hannibal’s arms and sweeps his hand through his hair in frustration. “It’s almost there, but it’s not enough. I can see what he does, but I can’t see _why_.”

He feels Hannibal’s eyes intent on him, studying, following Will’s movements as he paces around the table. “What is it that you need, Will?”

“More details,” he says, stopping with his hand on the back of a chair, to stare at Hannibal, flat and angry. “More details than I can get from anything I read online, more than I’ll ever be able to get.”

Hannibal only nods, his face still, and displaying none of Will’s dissatisfaction. “I’ve given some consideration to that possibility,” he says, and his lips twitch into the subtlest edge of a smile.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Will’s fingers tap restlessly against his thigh, the leather of the glove clinging to his skin. “I feel ridiculous.”

Hannibal’s head turns, and his eyes travel over the whole of him. “That seems appropriate, under the circumstances.”

Hannibal’s eyes are the only part of him visible, because they’re dressed identically. It was funny enough seeing Hannibal dressed in plain black jeans and a cheap jacket and sweater, without adding the stereotypical ski mask with eye holes. “This was easier when I could walk into the morgue, look at the bodies and have a chat with the pathologist,” Will grumbles. He shifts his weight more from one leg to the other, crouched with his back against the wall of the house.

“It could be easier now, if you were inclined to be practical,” Hannibal says mildly.

“We’re not killing him,” Will says, in the same tone. Not unless they have to. If he recognizes Hannibal, it all changes, but Will’s taking every precaution against that. 

Doctor Thiago Sosa is the head forensic pathologist in Córdoba, and on such a high profile case, he’s the one directly responsible for liaising with the police and the provincial authorities. It doesn’t matter whether he does the autopsies personally, or only processes the reports of his staff – he knows as much as anybody does about the dead children.

Doctor Sosa has two adult daughters, the eldest with a life and a home of her own, and another away at university. He also has a wife, who’s an enthusiastic truco player. Her Facebook page and comments reveal in advance when her group’s games are scheduled, and Doctor Sosa can be found at home alone for the evening.

He’s been working late recently; he rarely leaves his office before eight.

They’ve been at the house since ten after, allowing for travel time, and some margin in case this is one of his earlier nights. The satellite view of the online maps gave them information about the house’s setting, including the bushes providing privacy from the neighbours. When they got here, they skirted around the back, constructing an idea of the interior layout through the windows. They know as much as they’re going to, and the waiting is all that’s left. 

The temperature’s cool enough for their clothing to be comfortable, and the moon’s thin – the wait isn’t particularly risky, but it’s boring, and it’s putting Will on edge, because they’re not going to get another chance at this if they fuck it up.

Will hears his own breath over the chirping of the cicadas, and he hears Hannibal’s. There’s a tension in both of them, and between them, rising each time a car passes along the street, and it dies back a little less each time one moves on.  


He’s waiting in the dark, with Hannibal, waiting in total awareness of the man beside him and the certainty of what’s coming, every sense stretched outward into the night, dragging detail from each slow second. They’re not waiting for a killer, and they’re not waiting to kill, but the expectation is a tingling, crackling buzz that shivers along his nerves all the same. 

They’re waiting for someone who has no idea what’s about to happen. They know, and the knowledge defines power.

Another car turns into the street, and this time it doesn’t move on. This time it slows, and pulls into the driveway, and the light from its headlamps sweeps across the side of the yard where they’re not.

Hannibal toes off his shoes as the car approaches the house. 

Will opted to defer to experience for this part. He put in his years as a street cop before he diverted himself into the more academic pursuits of forensics and profiling, but he’s in no doubt which of them is more practiced at quickly and very _quietly_ restraining someone who’d prefer not to be.

The pathologist gets out of his car, a bunch of keys rattling in his hand and glinting in the moonlight; as he opens the front door, Hannibal grabs him from behind, one hand over his mouth, the other arm crossing his chest and holding a blade flat against his throat. He keeps the momentum up and bundles him inside before the man even has time to think about reacting. 

Will slips in right behind them, and closes the door. The nearest house is far enough and the build quality good enough that there’d have to be quite a bit of noise now before it attracted attention.

The alarm pad is beeping on the wall, and Hannibal twists the man to face it. He doesn’t speak, only angles the tip of the knife more firmly against skin, and a single drop of blood rises and begins to ooze its way slowly down the side of Sosa’s neck. 

Will points to the alarm, and Sosa gives it just one more second of thought before he keys in the code to silence it.

Will drops to his knees and grabs hold of Sosa’s legs so he can’t kick. Hannibal moves the blade away from his throat, grasping him tighter round the chest, and his left hand shifts up the half inch from his mouth to pinch his nostrils closed too.

Sosa wriggles and thrashes, tugging futilely at Hannibal with his one free arm, his muscles bunching and twisting against Will’s grip, but they’ve got him pinned, and he’s only using up oxygen faster. It lasts maybe a minute – a long and violent minute, with Will using his full body weight to subdue the struggling, and there’s something in his head telling him this could be _easier_ – before Sosa sags limp against Hannibal, and they drag him through to the dining room and duct tape him to a chair.

Hannibal wraps the bloodied knife in plastic before he returns it to his pocket, and Will thoughtfully hands him back his shoes.

Hannibal stands behind Sosa, watching him breathe from above, and as he begins to wake, he reaches round to cover his mouth again. The doctor’s first reaction when he’s only partly coherent might not be a smart one.

Will waits until Sosa’s fully lucid, eyes locked on Will in huge, unblinking terror, and then he takes out the mp3 player and hits start.

It plays a message stating that they don’t plan to hurt him or his family, and they’re not here to rob him. They only want him to answer some questions about his work, and if he answers them truthfully and doesn’t do anything reckless, they’ll leave him alive and well. The sentences were pieced together painstakingly from words and phrases plucked from all kinds of Spanish language sources on youtube, and when it ends, Doctor Sosa’s looking furious, but a little of the panic has receded from his eyes. He’s looking furious, like he’d _murder_ Will if he got even half of a chance, and there’s a part of Will’s brain shifting and rising in response to that. 

It’s nothing that will strip Will of logic and focus, and he scrolls down to the next mp3 file. ‘Do you understand?’

Sosa nods, and Hannibal slides his hand away to let him answer as Will plays the first of his questions. 

Will spent way too many hours watching terrible Spanish crime dramas and soap operas, sifting through episodes on murder and autopsies, looking for particular words and phrases. When he complained about it, Hannibal only smiled and told him it would be good for him, and Will’s Spanish vocabulary has definitely expanded as a result. He understands now most of what the pathologist is saying, though he still records everything to check details and nuances later, and Hannibal nods slightly at him from his position behind Sosa, confirming that the answers have covered the exact details he’s seeking. 

Sosa relaxes a bit more as the strange, constructed interrogation goes on, and it becomes clear they really are asking him about his work, and not even the most sensitive information he knows. They’re details he shouldn’t be giving, and wouldn’t without duress, but it’s nothing that can be _used._ They’re not asking him about dead politicians who were found to have a porn star tattoo, nothing that could be blackmail material for a grieving family. The doctor is generally very forthcoming, almost enthusiastic about keeping them happy, and Will only has to play the files that say, ‘More detail please’ or ‘Answer the question precisely’ a couple of times.

It takes about thirty-five minutes before Will’s satisfied he’s heard everything, and he flips through the menu and plays the final message. “I’m sorry we can’t untie you. Your wife will do that when she gets back.” 

An apology is something of a hollow statement after everything they’ve just done, but Will thought the gesture was marginally better than nothing.

It’s worth one evening of fear for this blameless man, because they need to know. It will be worth it if they can save Abril Arias, because she vanished yesterday, and her two week timer’s already started ticking. 

Hannibal grips Sosa’s head from behind, holding him still while Will duct tapes his mouth.

They leave through the back of the house, peeling off the ski masks and gloves and pushing them into their pockets. Hannibal’s hair is a static-charged mess, sticking out at angles everywhere, and Will has to choke back a laugh before he pets his fingers over it, persuading it to lie in something like order, though personally he likes Hannibal to be a little mussed. He sees now why Hannibal was always so reluctant to wear a hat, even in the worst of an east coast winter.

They look like any two guys in sweaters and jeans taking an evening stroll as they walk back to the car they left on the next street over. Córdoba’s home to one of the oldest universities in the Americas, and it’s as multinational as most major centres of renown. There’s no obvious visual distinction separating locals from outsiders here.

It's not their car they’re returning to – they borrowed one for the duration, and added some plastic seat covers as a precaution in case anything went wrong. Hannibal drove them here, and Will drops into the passenger seat for the fifteen minute ride to their next stop. The interior of the car is washed in regular stripes of unflattering sodium yellow from the street lighting, shadows etched stark and deep in the lines of Hannibal’s face.

Will looks at the lump in Hannibal’s pocket that might be the mask, or might be the carefully bagged knife, and he wonders about Hannibal’s restrained use of violence, and how much it takes for him to stop. 

The plastic squeaks beneath him when he twists around in his seat, angling towards Hannibal, studying him as he drives. His expression’s impassive, neutral, entirely unaffected by everything they’ve done, and what it means.

“Did you want to kill him?”

Hannibal turns his head just enough for Will to see the raised eyebrow. “Why would I? He was as pleasant and helpful as could be expected, under the circumstances.”

He isn’t exactly answering Will’s question, but Will doesn’t really need him to.

He felt it, dragging Freddie Lounds from the car. How easy it would be to do it.

He wouldn’t; she didn’t deserve it (she deserved a lot of things, but not _that_ ), so he wouldn’t, but there was an immensity in knowing that he could, that he got to still her fighting and make that choice for her. It whispered along his nerves as he tied her struggling form to a chair, and she heard its chorus from within him, because she always did. The fear stared unalloyed from her eyes even after he called Jack; it didn’t die away until Jack was actually in the room.

He felt it again with Mason Verger, holding him pinned to the floor of his pig-watching balcony ( _and Randall Tier lay splayed beneath him, and Will was punching him, beating him, hearing bones crack under his hands_ ), and that was harder because Mason _absolutely_ deserved it, that and so much more, but Will leashed it because he had a different agenda, or he thought he did at the time.

He wonders what made Hannibal hold its leash tonight. Did he stop for himself, or was it for Will?

The answer wouldn’t change any decision Will’s already made, but it might be useful information for the future.

Will’s under no illusions that he controls Hannibal. Oh, Hannibal will do a _lot_ to keep Will Graham, he’s more than proven that, but Will can’t use that as a brake or he’ll lock up the wheels and they’ll both be destroyed in the wreck. He got to make that move precisely once, and he used it for Alana. 

Everything else is a compromise, and sometimes Hannibal will, and sometimes he won’t, and Will’s okay living with the times when he won’t. Dinner with Bedelia and her caustic commentary wasn’t an experience Will thinks of as a highlight of their life together, but Hannibal was going to do it either way, and it pleased him to have Will there. 

Will likes pleasing Hannibal; Bedelia simply didn’t matter enough to disappoint him.

The list of people who would matter enough isn’t all that long.

They take the car back to its parking spot and strip out the plastic seat covers, leaving it exactly as they found it, minus maybe a gallon of gas. The owner’s elderly and deaf; he takes out his hearing aid when he turns off the TV after the evening news, and he goes to bed early. It’s unlikely he ever noticed it was gone.

They walk the quarter mile to collect their own car, and they head for home.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  


Dinner’s late, after their evening excursion. Will has the dogs to feed and walk while Hannibal cooks, and it’s close to midnight by the time they’ve eaten and everything’s cleared away.

Hannibal pours himself another glass of wine when they move to the sofa, and Will nurses a tumbler of whiskey. He tilts his head back onto the cushion behind him, his left arm curved over its top.

His fingers play through the strands of hair at Hannibal’s neck and ear, brushing skin, and it’s quiet, calming, within the constant background of the ticking clock and Sarah’s soft snoring from the dog bed in the corner. “There’s a gap of two weeks each time, between when he takes them and when the bodies are found, but they were all killed at most the day before?”

“That’s what our friend the doctor said,” Hannibal confirms. His body’s angled away from Will, his head tipped to rest against Will’s shoulder, and his relaxed mood spreads into his tone. His head’s a little heavy against Will’s collarbone, but it’s his good shoulder, and it works this way round.

“So why does he keep them alive?” Irrespective of any other motive, there’s an itch in Will’s brain, one that doesn’t ever go away until he has the answers to his puzzles. “He’s not doing anything to them. He’s not a paedophile, they haven’t been abused in any way.” He’s not vicious, hurting them in redirected pain for a lost, tortured childhood of his own.

Hannibal inclines his head. “It would appear that he takes little interest in them at all. They have access to water, they’re not dehydrated before death, but he feeds them only rarely. This isn’t a case of a mis-directed caregiver growing angry with their repeated rejections until the killer rejects them in turn.”

Will turns his nose into Hannibal’s hair, breathing the scent of that woody shampoo he favours, and Will uses because it’s there. He never bothered to tell Hannibal he likes it, but he’s certain he knows. “If he doesn’t have any use for them, if this is all about the killing, why wouldn’t he do it right away?”

“Perhaps it would be unpleasant spending prolonged periods of time around a decaying corpse,” Hannibal suggests, his accent coloured by amusement.

Will makes a face. “More unpleasant and inconvenient than a crying, screaming child who needs access to bathroom facilities?” He twists the glass he holds on his thigh, watching the Scotch rise and settle back along the sides. “The timing’s important, or he’d just take them, kill them and get rid of them within a day or two. He has to wait, and they have to be alive.”

“Various cultures have practiced human sacrifice, sometimes involving specific rituals for the sacrifice’s preparation. Our killer may seek to recreate a lost art form.” There’s no resonant curiosity in Hannibal’s words – he’s offering up a possibility he’s not honestly buying into, and neither is Will.

“There’s nothing about the bodies to suggest ceremony.”

“Nor in their disposal,” Hannibal agrees. “They appear to be discarded, more than venerated.”

Will’s nose wrinkles, feeling it. He’s intimately aware of how their killer thinks about his victims. “He dumps them like so much garbage. Somewhere they’re found fast. When he does kill them, the world has to know it.”

Hannibal shifts himself upright then, turning to look at Will. “The world has to know it,” he echoes, with a slight tilt of his head. “It may be the attention he receives as a killer of children that’s important, rather than the children themselves.” 

Will shakes his head in frustration. What Hannibal’s saying makes sense, but it’s not entirely right, and if he can only figure out how he knows it’s not right, he’ll know what is. “If he wanted attention, he’d be reaching out, leaving messages. There are no messages in the bodies. They don’t say anything. He already has what he wants.”

“Then the attention isn’t about himself, or the children. So who does that leave?”

Will stills with the awareness when it slots into place, the final cog in his head that makes it all work, and he _knows_. “It leaves _exactly_ who it leaves.” It’s not about the children. They’re incidental. It’s about the _effect_ that their absence has, the absence and the knowledge of how that absence ends. It’s about the power wielded over those left behind, and there’s nothing more powerful than the grief of a parent for a child. “He watches the videos. He watches them over and over, but they don’t change and they grow stale.”

And because Hannibal is who he is, he’s already caught up with everything Will didn’t actually say. “After the first victim was found dead, the families of the second child he abducted were more frantic. Their pleas for mercy became more desperate. His power over them increased.”

“He enjoyed those videos more.” It’s a very public grief, expressed in tear-filled statements to an expectant media, and he controls it. He can make them feel it, and say it; he chooses who gets to know that loss, and he watches them beg him openly, faceless and unknown as he is, to spare _their_ little one where he didn’t spare the others. 

“Serial killers tend to escalate.” Hannibal’s attention sears into Will now, a focus narrowed and pure, dark eyes intent as he studies him piecing it together. “He could have grown more brutal to further increase the pain of the families, but he didn’t. What is he doing to elevate his involvement instead?”

Will’s staring at Hannibal and he knows it’s there in those words – his answer, the key he’s been looking for to unlock his killer.

They always did this – the conversations where their words and thoughts danced back and forth, minds bounding over one another in the chase to complete an idea, and fuck, it’s been _years_ since they genuinely worked together, and it feels as dazzling as it ever did; this astonishing trip where his brain synchs perfectly with Hannibal’s, and nobody else could consistently do this, not only keeping track of Will’s leaps, but building the next platform ready for him to jump to.

All the information’s here in his head now. It only requires the application. 

He closes his eyes for the moment of transition, and opens them again to become someone else, someone sadistic, someone who finds torture can be far more skilfully applied through non-physical means. He’s sitting in a darkened room, with the windows covered to keep out reflections, and his gaze is locked to the screen. “I watch the videos until they’re not enough, and then I dispose of that object and take the next. I watch those new videos and they’re better, because they’re more broken.” The videos are exposed, brutally so, allowing him to absorb every raw detail of the loss and pain that he devised. “I watch them and then I replace them. I can keep on making more; the supply is endless.” He reaches to touch the glass of the screen, and he frowns because it’s too simple, and more of the same is unsatisfying. “The separation is… offensive. I want to be closer to my creation. I have to see it for myself.”

His eyes blink again and he snaps back into himself. It’s easier to do it, much easier when he’s not staring at dead children, when he’s not _stabbing_ them, and he’s sitting bolt upright on the sofa, the whiskey glass clutched tight in his fingers.

His hand reaches for Hannibal’s arm, and he looks at him and he states it with absolute certainty. “The press conference. He’s going to be there.”


	3. Chapter 3

There’s a period when they can only wait. 

The police have to make all the usual inquiries on Abril Arias. They’ll check that she isn’t simply lost, question her relatives and delve for family issues that might lead one parent to snatch their child from the other. They’ll piece together the details of her disappearance and canvas every potential witness. It’s several days before the authorities unofficially conclude that the killer most likely has her, a couple more to arrange the big media circus. 

Their murderer’s waiting for it, and Will’s waiting for him.

He needs that time for research. He watches all the videos the killer watches and more, gathering what details he can of the press room, though the cameras tend to tight focus on the faces, and he doesn’t get much. 

Hannibal makes contact with someone he’s never met, and never will, with another request for paperwork.

It’s almost surprising to Will that they still have a daily routine underlying their preparations for murder, but they do; of course they do. There are the dogs to walk and feed, and they cook and eat and sleep on a regular schedule, and everything’s domestic and normal, except for the moments when it’s not. 

“When we kill him, what weapon will you use?” Hannibal says it calmly, reasonably, like he’s asking what Will would like for lunch, and nothing inside Will is calm about the question, or the images it raises in his head. His hands freeze into stillness on the carrot he’s dicing.

They’re going to do it. They’ll be able to do it, and the question is a valid one.

He’s most familiar with firearms, but he doesn’t have one here, and it doesn’t feel… right. He remembers Randall Tier, remembers throwing aside the shotgun, and it wasn’t a decision. He just needed to get closer, to hurt him directly, with his hands. 

His eyes drop to the knife he holds, typical of Hannibal’s kitchens, stylised gleaming elegance with an edge honed to perfect sharpness. He remembers Dolarhyde, how the blade sank in and then sliced through his flesh, remembers how the blood flowed over the weapon and onto his skin and Hannibal’s eyes fixed on him, endlessly absorbed and devoted, and that’s the feeling he wants, the moment his greed seeks so eagerly to recreate.

“I think a knife, don’t you?” Will’s impressed by the level of detachment he finds for his voice, when his gut is tight with the memory of it, vivid behind his eyes.

There’s the slightest hint of curl at the ends of Hannibal’s lips, because he anticipated that answer. “We should consider a few lessons,” he says. “There are ways to be efficient with a blade, places to target to ensure they’ll never have a chance to turn it on you.”

Will’s mind leaps through the photos of missing children, laughing and smiling with gaps in their teeth, and the appalling, crushing pain of losing Abigail, his pseudo-daughter of only a few months. He hears and feels the abyss yawning beneath Hannibal’s words on those incredibly rare occasions when he speaks of Mischa, and he tips his head up and raises his eyebrows at Hannibal. “What if I don’t want it to be ‘efficient’?”

And Will sees the quick flash of it there in Hannibal’s eyes; the belief, the belief that’s been missing beneath all the love, the belief that vanished with the resurrection of Freddie Lounds. It’s only there for a moment, but it’s _there_ , and Hannibal’s fingers settle soft over Will’s cheek as he smiles. “I can show you how to do that too.”

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hannibal begins their practice at the efficiency end of the spectrum, and Will agrees it’s the right strategy. He has no desire to play trade-the-blade with another killer, but even so, Hannibal’s starting point is frustratingly basic. 

He jabs the blunt end of the pencil into Hannibal’s neck with a little more force than he strictly needs. “I know where to find an artery, Hannibal. I took first aid courses every two years as a cop, and I’ve sat in on a lot of autopsies.”

The expression on Hannibal’s face barely shifts, but his disapproval oozes through clearly enough. “You know where to check the pulse of an unconscious person, and you understand the anatomy of a conveniently laid out body. The knowledge can be more troublesome to apply when your target is a moving one.”

Will shifts his grip on the pencil, palming it more tightly, and parts his lips to show his teeth. “So move.”

And Hannibal does.

He makes a grab for Will’s right arm first, the obvious choice to gain control over the weapon, and Will expects it, twists and evades; he jabs for the neck again, but Hannibal isn’t there.

He’s dropped low, and there’s pressure behind Will’s leg, sudden and tugging, and his balance is off, he’s going to fall. Will rolls with it, literally, curling away before Hannibal can pin him, but there’s only so far to go before he hits the sofa. He slashes with the pencil at the wrist that’s reaching for him, aiming thumb side of the tendons, and Hannibal backs off and changes tack, seizing Will by the ankle instead, dragging him closer. Will kicks out with his free leg, but Hannibal’s quick enough to grab that one too and kneel on them both.

Will jerks upright, easy with Hannibal’s weight on his legs, stabbing again towards his neck and making Hannibal rear back to dodge it. Will carries his forward movement, folding at the waist to bring him closer, using his left hand to grab for the throat this time. It’s pure distraction, he doesn’t have the angle or the strength in his non-dominant hand to make it count, and Hannibal reads it for what it is. Hannibal blocks Will’s lunge with his elbow and continues the movement of his hand across their bodies to grasp hold of Will’s right shoulder, simultaneously curling his fingers tight and pushing Will back towards the floor. Will lashes for his wrist with the pencil, but Hannibal’s left hand catches his forearm and twists his arm up and around against the hold on his shoulder. There’s a flash of pain through the joint, high and sharp, a twitch in Will’s fingers causing him to drop the pencil, and Hannibal instantly loosens the grip on his arm. 

Will carefully rolls out his shoulder, looking up at the man crouched over him, Hannibal still in watch mode in case he struggles again. “You fight dirty,” he says, with a grin. Jack told him as much, years ago.

Hannibal mirrors his expression, the open display of teeth a very clear indicator of his mood. “Did you expect Queensberry rules?”

Will’s breathing hard, and his laugh is more of a huff. “Not from you.” Hannibal uses any method he needs to win; he always has.

Hannibal leans in further, more pressure on Will’s shoulder, uncomfortable. “My weight advantage is worth more when you’re on the floor. I’ll always want to take you down fast. You should have targeted my leg as you fell.” He rocks back on his heels, releasing Will’s upper body. “The femoral artery here.” He traces a line along the inside of his thigh with a finger. “It runs deep. You need commitment to reach it through the muscle.” 

He switches to Will’s leg then, touching him at the back of his knee. “The popliteal artery may be more accessible. It’s directly behind the joint in the midline, and it’s less well protected.”

“Got it.” Will does remember that from the corpses he’s examined, but it wasn’t his instinct in a fight.

Hannibal climbs to his feet, and Will follows him up as his legs are released. “Again?”

“Again,” Hannibal agrees, and this time Will goes on the offensive from the start.

Will’s never seen Hannibal fight, though he’s seen the results of his savage violence often enough. He saw some of that potential with Dolarhyde, but Hannibal was shot before things got up close and physical, and Will knew better than to take what he gleaned that night as typical. It’s exhilarating now, experiencing the reality of what he’s pieced together from his past reconstructions.

Hannibal’s _fast._ Not fast in a martial arts way, though he’s quicker than Will would have predicted for someone his age and size. His real speed comes from his reading of the situation, his anticipation of Will’s moves and the immediate selection of an effective counter. He’s unpredictable on the offensive, eschewing an obvious opening in favour of a more obscure attack, then more rarely doing _exactly_ what Will would expect just when he no longer does.

He’s infuriatingly difficult to reach in anything but non-vital places, and Will would have made him bleed twenty times or more with a knife, but he wouldn’t have killed him. Hannibal’s only half way pulling punches – Will’s going to have a good array of bruises tomorrow from both the man and the floor – but Will’s not giving too much leeway either, and he’s not the only one who’ll ache. While he’s not winning, he doesn’t lose easily.

They’re both focussed on the contest, their clash of wills and muscle, but their underlying sexuality adds an inevitable charge to it – the unbroken stares, the extreme physical closeness and constant contact with this man his body knows so intimately and associates with a very different kind of activity. Will’s not even half way hard, too much demand for blood-flow from his limbs to allow for that, but there’s definitely _potential_ coiling through his belly beneath the adrenaline. He’s stretched flat on his back with Hannibal leaning over him, and when they’re done here, he’s going to take Hannibal to their bed and fuck every trace of that smug superiority out of his eyes.

The more he thinks about that, the better an idea it becomes, and he hauls himself up from the floor yet again, fixing their gazes together before he trails his eyes slow and obvious down Hannibal’s body. “We could call a halt at this point,” he offers, his lips curving into a smile.

There’s an answering flash across Hannibal’s face, the desire exposed, and then suppressed as he shakes his head. “You need more practice.”

Will narrows his eyes. “I’m doing well enough. You beat me because you know me.” Exploiting his messed up shoulder as a weakness is a case in point. “A stranger won’t have those advantages.”

“He might also be younger and faster than both of us.” Hannibal steps in close, lifts his hand to Will’s neck, and tips their foreheads together. “I want for you everything you want for yourself, Will, but I do not wish to see you come to harm.”

His words are the gentlest of vows, and Will reaches for Hannibal’s hand and breathes through the sudden hammering of his heart, because Hannibal loves him without limits, and any time he believes he has to hurt Will to protect him, he won’t hesitate. 

If fifty cops suddenly descend on this house, Will’s going to find a knife in his gut again, and there won’t be any warning. The immensity of Hannibal’s love is simultaneously reassuring and terrifying, because Hannibal sometimes has very strange ideas about what’s best for Will Graham. 

Will holds the moment and the feeling, letting it sink into his memory and embed there, and then he draws their heads apart and releases his hand. “More, then,” he says, because Hannibal needs that now.

Hannibal drops his hand from Will’s neck and takes a few extra steps back. “I recall it’s your opening move,” he says, and Will makes a lunge at his chest, ducks beneath his block and stabs towards his armpit.

They fight for nearly another thirty minutes before Hannibal calls a halt. “I believe that may be sufficient practice of this type for today. We should move on.” They’ve slowed noticeably, and Will’s not gaining the experience that he was, only training in endurance, and he’s reaching the limits of that. The bruising’s telling on both of them, and Hannibal’s bleeding from his lip because Will didn’t stop an attack in time and Hannibal wasn’t quick enough to evade.

Hannibal’s breath heaves through his chest, his shirt sticking damp between his shoulders as he walks through to the kitchen, and Will follows after him, because he knows Hannibal doesn’t mean to end the lesson, only alter the format. 

“Holding a weapon will be different from a pencil,” Hannibal says with a flash of teeth, and he turns away from Will to the knife block, drawing out a medium length boning knife with a thinly curved blade. “There are a number of ways to use one.” He inspects it, holding it at different angles, the metal casting the light from the window as a bright, moving spot on the wall. There’s a bruise starting to rise over his cheekbone, where Will’s elbow connected, a trace of blood on his lower lip where it was crushed against his own incisors and a drying streak of it smeared across his chin.

Hannibal steps closer to Will with steel glinting in his hand and dishevelled hair flopping loose into his eyes, and his lips curl at Will with fresh, wet redness edging his teeth. There’s something alive behind the mask that is his face, something entirely predatory with no concept of mercy or understanding, and _the rain beats on the glass and Will’s shirt clings icy at his skin, and Hannibal’s pulling him close in a room drowning in love and rage, and in pain so unimaginable Will can barely make a sound through it, an extremity of agony that never stops as Hannibal jerks the knife through him, jerks it again, and again, and again_

and it’s daylight, and he’s at home in Argentina, with the man who isn’t just his love any more, but his lover, the man he sleeps alongside, skin on skin each night in absolute trust.

Will’s lips part and he’s breathing carefully between them, deeper, slowing it, regulating it, his eyes locked with those of his killer who wants him very much whole and alive.

Hannibal lays the knife down, slow and deliberate on the nearest countertop. “Perhaps we can construct our lesson differently.”

Will takes another breath to be sure his own weight is something his legs control, that he’s not sinking to his knees to join his own blood pooling on the tiles, and he steps forward and picks up the knife. “I believe so.” He twists it in the sun, like Hannibal did, staring into its curved reflections, familiar and harmless in his grip. He was using it to prepare chicken breasts two nights ago. Sometimes they do eat chicken.

“How you hold it depends on what you intend to do with it.” Will’s eyes snap back to Hannibal, and he’s keeping a measured pace as he moves to stand beside Will, reaching around him to twine their fingers on the handle. “For a stabbing thrust, the best grip is like this.” He nudges at Will’s thumb and forefinger, gently shifting their position, tightens his hold over Will’s hand when he gets it right. It feels… positive. Easy to overcome resistance without his grip sliding. 

Hannibal’s pressed up against him, breathing along one side of his neck in sweat and blood and dishevelled clothes, and Will stands immobile as his fingers are moved on the handle again. “For a right to left slice, you hold it this way.” Will hears the words and his brain controls his hand, shifting between the two positions until the voice is satisfied he’s got it, and his mind stays narrowed down to the knife, the man touching him pushed distant and… secondary.

“As a right-handed person, cutting left to right, you’ll achieve more force if you reverse the grip, instead of rotating the wrist.” A hand loosens Will’s hold on the knife entirely, turns it around and presses his fingers back into place. “Like this.”

Will doesn’t have to imagine it, how it feels to use it that way. He knows it. It’s exactly what he did to Dolarhyde, when he killed him. “I understand.” His own voice is as eerie as that other one whispering in his ear, and he doesn’t feel like he’s quite in the room.

Hannibal twists the knife from his clutching fingers, and veers wide away from Will as he moves past him to slide it into place in the block. 

Will looks at his hand, at his palm curling empty, and lowers it back down to his side.

The kitchen’s silent, only the clock ticking through it, and the passing seconds are a number that grows in Will’s head. Sarah yaps from outside, followed by a rapid scuffling of paws and a single, deeper bark of Lola’s. Will’s eyes move to the window, finding the young hare streaking towards the bushes, far faster than any of his dogs can run and turn. He draws himself back into the kitchen, his attention settling inevitably onto Hannibal, on his sweat-damp shirt pulled tight across his rounded shoulders, his head dipped, leaning forward with his hands resting on the stove’s edge. 

Will parts his lips to say something, but all he can seem to do is breathe out air with no words.

Hannibal turns to look at him, face stiff and marble cold beneath the blood and the bruising. “I won’t apologise for what I did. If you betrayed me again, I’d do the same.”

“I know.” Will’s smile feels washed out, pale and thin like overcast hanging on the ocean horizon, and he reaches to brush the back of his hand along Hannibal’s exposed forearm, a reassurance to mellow this acknowledgement of the truths they’ve both chosen to live with.

There’s no answer to that, there can’t be, and he walks from the kitchen to join the dogs in the yard. He bends to touch them, rubbing his fingers through the fur at the base of long ears, noses pressing damp against his hands and wrists, then he whistles them to his heels and heads away into the warmth of the late morning air.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

They don’t talk about it again – a debate won’t change the underlying facts. They take their space, and when Will comes back close to lunchtime, Hannibal’s already cooking. He smiles his welcome, and Will washes the arugula, and they drop straight into their customary pattern of light conversation and frequent touches.

Will’s not surprised by it. He carries a vivid memory of striding into the BSHCI, stiff with fury, to confront Hannibal after he tried to murder _Molly._ It was maybe three minutes before they slid into discussing the psychology and motivations of the Great Red Dragon, with all its parallels, and Molly wasn’t in the room with them anymore. _’Don’t you crave change, Will?’_

Will changed a lot of things in the days following that one. 

He’ll change more, in the days about to come.

Hannibal resumes his tutoring, reinforcing the techniques of the first morning, expanding further on how to be ‘efficient’, and transitioning to the ideas of something much less so. Will takes to it quickly – he’s always been a rapid learner, with his ability to experience instead of merely watching, and Hannibal’s careful about the circumstances when they’re handling blades. In the absence of blood and the kitchen, there are no further difficulties; there’s only Will loving Hannibal, and wanting him, and luxuriating in their contact.

The next time they have sex, after their morning of unsought exposure, it’s fierce and fast, adding more bruises to those they’ve already placed on each other. 

It’s not the only time it’s like that.

There’s a tension between them now, every day, every minute when they’re close, that goes beyond their usual simmering attraction. There’s no discomfort in it, just something waiting under their skin, a tingling anticipation. They both remember how it was, how it felt, taking down Dolarhyde, killing with each other and for each other; they see it in each other when they look, when they linger over dinner with wine and candles, the knowledge of it, the savage intensity they’ll get to burn with again, and the air prickles electric with how much they both want it.

It’s waiting for them, in a future that’s so very close.

This time, Will won’t reject it. He won’t find the horror in it, the last squirming protests of a man who once lectured in classrooms to evade the dynamic shock of real-time violence exploding through his mind. He’ll thrive in it, power and elation through every bone, immersed deep for as long as it can sustain through his body, and he knows it.

He turns the knowledge around in his head, studying its shapes, and he finds no disquiet anywhere in its corners.

He’s ready to be this person, and now he’s sure, he wants it to be soon. 

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Will decides to shave his face clean before the conference, and Hannibal gives one of his entirely genuine smiles and says, “I would very much like to do that for you, if you’re willing.” 

He’s willing to do a lot more than that with Hannibal’s eyes fixed on him in circling eddies of love and fascination, and he lets the dogs out, then sits back in a chair at the dining table, one towel draped around his shoulders and another rolled up behind his neck. 

Hannibal’s hands are gentle on his face, coating him in a shaving foam with the same pleasant scent as their shampoo, tilting his chin and stretching his skin as he works. Hannibal uses a safety razor instead of going dramatically old fashioned, which Will is intensely grateful for. He’s a lot more settled now than he was when Hannibal repaired his scar, only a few weeks after he came here, but his waver in the kitchen last week made it clear he still has tolerance limits for Hannibal coming at him with an exposed blade. Will knows there are rocks out there in the soft grey mists that obscure the murky slough beneath them, but he’s sailing without a chart, and he’ll never be sure where they are until he smacks up against them. 

There’s an incredible sense of calm radiating from Hannibal, quietly absorbed in what he’s doing, and it’s equally absorbing to Will, relaxing into the waves of attention and care that sweep around him. His eyes drift closed, and he wallows in the simple peace of it, visions in his head of a boat at anchor, balanced between the push of the wind and the tide. 

There are times when he could let himself forget what Hannibal is. 

He opens his eyes and seeks out Hannibal’s, looking past the layer of enamoured devotion that exists only for Will, and down into the depths beyond. 

Will doesn’t want to forget, not any more. Hannibal is exactly who he needs him to be. 

Hannibal scrapes away the remnants of foam and stubble from his neck, one last careful stroke of the razor, and pats his skin dry with a facecloth. He takes a step back, stretching fully upright, a slight tilt to his head as he considers the result. “I believe that will have the desired effect,” he says. 

Will sheds the towels and goes to check himself in the mirror, Hannibal shadowing along behind him. 

His face looks almost absurdly naked and white under the stark bathroom lights. He let his hair dry how it wanted after his shower, and he has tight curls hanging down towards his eyes and sticking out erratically by his ears. The combined effect leaves him years younger, and a lot more innocent, not a face the public would instantly associate with a murderer. He still has a scar along his cheek, but it’s faded down thin and pale, and his resemblance to the bearded, disfigured, hollow-eyed man in Jack’s seven-month-old photos is distant. 

Will’s not a fan of the look – he spent too many years adopting something close to hide from himself as much as from the world – but he’ll pass. He meets Hannibal’s eyes in the mirror and smiles. “Nice work.” 

Hannibal’s hand strokes along Will’s jaw, their gazes still bound in the glass. “I can only work with the materials I’m given. Your face is innately pleasing.” 

Will lifts his left hand back over his shoulder, using the mirror to guide his fingers alongside Hannibal’s nose. “This from the man who might be a walking advertisement for cheekbones,” he says, his smile widening. 

“I wasn’t referring to your facial structure, though that is agreeable enough.” Will’s watching their reflections as Hannibal’s palm curves to fit his face, his oddly bare skin tingling with the fingers curled at his cheek. “It’s a facet of the whole, and the whole is so much more – your eyes that speak of each passing thought, the expressions that move through you, fleeting and vibrant. Your countenance conveys everything that you are, Will, your existence and uncommon charm written into the world for the appreciation of those who make the effort to look.” 

Will never really knows how to respond when Hannibal makes these speeches. Oh, he _reacts_ – the bottom drops away from his stomach, a swooping plunge into adrenaline and want, and his heart leaps and stops, then restarts at near double the rate, because Hannibal _loves him absolutely._ But his mind seethes blankly in the honesty expressed there, because he ought to say something back, something equally real, and he’d sound like a fucking idiot even trying. 

His answer is to deflect with humour, and he grins at Hannibal’s image, leaning back into his chest. “You might be the only person I’ve ever met who’d describe me as charming,” he says, and his hand covers Hannibal’s, holding him there against his skin, because Hannibal’s right, and Will’s body tells everything his words don’t. 

Hannibal’s lips twitch in the mirror, warm and amused. “That would be all the more reason for me to repeat it,” he says, and they stand a moment longer, a velvet contentment in watching and touching. 

The distraction on offer is inherently clear, and Will takes a breath and pulls away from it, breaking the picture he sees forming in the glass. “I need to leave before ten,” he says, and he goes to the kitchen, setting water to boil for coffee, and whistles the dogs to the door for food. 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hannibal made a trip into the city to collect a key that opens a drop box the evening before, and after they clear away the remains of an unusually short breakfast, he hands Will a visitor pass that declares him a member of the press, a writer for an online news site. The name on it’s yet another unfamiliar one, different from his current Canadian passport. “If you insist on proceeding with your plan, this will suffice,” Hannibal says.

Will looks up from his scrutiny of the plasticised document to throw Hannibal a teasing smile. “You only think it’s a bad idea because you’re not coming.”

Hannibal leans back against the edge of his desk and crosses his legs at the ankles. “I’m aware that it would be unwise for me to be in a room full of journalists with an interest in serial killers. You’re the one demonstrating a conspicuous lack of caution.”

Will widens both his eyes and his smile. “I’m not a serial killer.”

Hannibal’s mouth curls at the corners, and for a moment the future is hanging there between them, unspoken. “Merely a known associate.”

Will shrugs. “I’m the crazy ex-profiler with a habit of going into hiding when things get massively fucked up. Nobody who worked with me would be surprised I cracked and vanished after what happened with Dolarhyde, and with you.”

“The world of law enforcement would still like to ask you a lot of questions.”

“So with my history of being falsely accused and imprisoned, it’s obvious enough why I ran.” Will can say that as a statement now, only the faintest ember of resentment lingering on behind it.

Hannibal’s stare remains fixed on Will, his face blank and unmoving. “Not everyone believes you ran alone.” 

Jack Crawford certainly doesn’t, but what Jack believes doesn’t mean a damn thing to the legal system. “There’s no arrest warrant for me, Hannibal, not here. The only crime of mine anyone can prove is that I stole a guy’s wallet and spent fifty bucks on his credit card. Nobody extradites for petty theft.” If Will had used threats or violence, that would be a felony, and things would be different, but nobody knows about the guards at the house, because Jack couldn’t file charges for that without admitting he’d been holding Will in the first place.

Hannibal’s expression doesn’t change, and Will sets the press pass down on the desk, moves to stand in front of him and reaches up to rest his palm on the soft fabric at his chest.

If he’s photographed in Argentina, the immigration authorities will grow interested in the absence of any paperwork accounting for his presence in the country, but that won’t be an immediate priority. “If I’m recognised, we’ll have to leave, and that’s okay.” He smiles, easy and warm. “It’s nice enough here, but I’d be just as happy living with you in Bolivia.”

Hannibal’s face shifts and softens, and he lifts Will’s hand and presses a kiss against his knuckles. “I might suggest Colombia instead. Bolivia holds a less tolerant attitude towards two men in an obvious relationship.” 

There’s nothing unexpected in the answer, because of course Hannibal took those things into account before he bought a place in Argentina. Will did some research after he came here, and found they were living in the first country in South America to legalise gay marriage.

They’re not married. They can’t be, in reality, and legal niceties aren’t exactly a priority in their lives; they know what they are to each other, and they don’t need anyone’s paperwork to legitimise it. Will’s not convinced he could stand in front of a public official to solemnly swear undying love to Hector Claesson and keep a straight face, but the existence of the possibility matters – it carries with it a societal acceptance and an aura of normalcy that they need.

“Colombia will work,” he says, and his fingers curl between Hannibal’s, his thumb brushing over the back of his hand. Anywhere will work, if they can share their space, unremarked and unquestioned.

Hannibal exhales, long and slow, and reclaims his hand, angling his head as he studies Will. “It may not be as simple as you hope.”

Will arches an eyebrow at him. “Picking out the psychopathic serial killer from the room full of psychopaths who are merely journalists?” A flash of Freddie Lounds, sitting smugly composed at a conference table and declaring them all psychopaths together. “I think I’ve had enough exposure to both to exercise some judgement.”

“This killer has cunning, Will,” Hannibal says. “As you look into the void, take great care that the void isn’t also looking back.”

“He works and plans for a month just for these few, precious minutes,” Will points out. “I imagine he’ll be experiencing some degree of tunnel vision.”

“He walks by choice into the lions' den. He’ll need to know if the predators have seen him.”

Will smirks at Hannibal, brightly flippant. “You did something very similar.”

Hannibal reaches out to stroke his fingers across Will’s cheek, then down to settle at his neck. “And right away I found my predator who saw me in return.”

As Hannibal’s words break off, he lets the walls down, all of them, and Will’s not sure he ever had any, not against this man; Hannibal’s a seething maelstrom of yearning-anxiety-pride-fear-devotion rising over Will like a rogue wave, an intensity he’s rarely felt outside of sex and a warring complexity that has no solution, all bearing down to overwhelm him in turmoil, until Will wrenches their gaze apart and steps back from Hannibal’s hand to free himself from it. 

He reaches to the desk for the press pass and clips it deliberately to the front of his shirt, shoring his mental defences into place before he looks at him again. “If I’m a predator, it’s time I went hunting.”

The murky tension swirling behind Hannibal’s eyes is entirely familiar, because it’s what Will feels each time he lies awake in a too-large bed while Hannibal is out in the dark. This is one of the compromises they’ll both make now, because they love who they love, and neither of them made a choice that was safe.

Will didn’t feel that pressure over Molly, when he left their house for Baltimore, to hunt for the Tooth Fairy. He knew when he came back, he might have changed enough that his marriage would fail. He also knew that he was managing before Molly came, and he would manage again after she left. 

He managed before he met Hannibal too, but he’s never had to manage without him, because Will always carried Hannibal with him, everywhere. Hannibal could be thousands of miles away, or years out of his life, and he was still there for Will to talk to whenever he needed to, or wanted to, or just as often when he didn’t. It didn’t matter so much that he wasn’t physically there, right at that moment.

It would matter if Hannibal wasn’t anywhere, if he was permanently gone.

Hannibal doesn’t say anything now as Will stares him down, he only straightens from the desk and kisses him, gentle and long, all soft lips and fingers stroking patterns lightly at his ribs.

Will smiles at him when they part. “I’ll see you later,” he says, then he turns and walks along the hallway to the door, and out into the morning sun.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I inserted another section into chapter three a few weeks ago, which I'd originally thought would be a short flashback scene in chapter four. When it grew to a thousand words, I decided it needed to be in sequence. So if you read chapter three when it was first published, it got longer since then.

The press conference isn’t until the afternoon, timed so the reports will be ready for the peak early evening news slots, but Will’s got a lot to do.

His first move is to steal another car. They’ve been making mental checks as they drive around the neighbourhoods, noting the locations of older vehicles that don’t get much use. The ones that don’t travel a lot are more likely to be there when they want one, and less likely to be reported stolen for a while, so it’s a double win.

Will’s inside the Fiat and has it running in under a minute. He’s getting quicker at it. It’s not a talent he ever anticipated having regular practice for, but he never forgot the basics.

He spent a few months in his mid teens hanging out with people who were known as ‘the wrong crowd’, back when he was still trying to figure out if there was someplace he might fit in. They accepted him more easily than his classmates in school, because they’d accept anyone they could use, and he was smart enough to pick up new skills fast. He was also smart enough not to get caught, and to realise they were never going to welcome _him_ , only what he could do for them, so his foray into teenaged delinquency didn’t last long. That was one of the times his Dad’s wandering lifestyle and another relocation to a new part of the country suited him just fine. It might have been harder to get out than to get in, without a six hundred mile buffer.

He drives a few miles before he finds a quiet place to stop and switch out the plates, then heads on into the city.

The conference is being held in the press room at the provincial police headquarters. Will checked out the area around it extensively with online maps, in case he finds himself leaving in a hurry, but he wants to drive the streets in person too. Like most of Córdoba, the district’s heavy on one way systems, with only a few major arterials letting traffic flow both ways, and the river a few blocks north complicates the layout further. He’s not going to get himself cornered looking for a bridge.

He circles the area for close to an hour, confirming what he knows. He finds one construction zone he’ll need to avoid if he’s making a fast exit, and amends his mental escape routes to compensate. He stops at a store to buy a cheap phone, then heads back to the police precinct.

He has a slightly queasy moment at the barrier to the parking beneath the station, looking an armed cop in the eye while he hands over his new ID. He reminds himself he’s not a criminal here, not officially; he’s only acting like one because he’s living with one. But he’s taking risks today in a number of ways, and the relief settles in his gut when the pole lifts and he can head down into the dim light of the garage.

Inside the building, he’s happy to find the press room is signed, and so are the restrooms further along the hall (‘washrooms’ he pokes himself mentally, he’s supposed to be Canadian now). The room’s arranged exactly how it was in the videos he watched, the same way these places always are, with desks and chairs and a podium on a raised platform. There are technical staff already in there, setting up equipment, and a few reporters who’ve grabbed their seats in the front row. Will didn’t want to stand out by being the first to arrive, but he wanted to know who else was keen enough to get here early.

He arranges himself in the hallway, propped against the wall, keeping a check on the door to the media room while he pokes at the screen of the new phone. Will’s not looking to mingle. The press pass got him into the building. Now he intends to watch.

Despite what he said to Hannibal, Will’s aware his plan doesn’t exactly come with a guarantee. He’s one guy with a limited time window, and he can’t study everyone and be subtle about it. He’ll give them all a glance, sure, but he needs to be selective, and he’s playing the statistics with his priorities.

He’s eliminating almost fifty percent of the people here on the basis of gender. Female serial killers are rare, and they tend to be healthcare workers and poisoners, or they come as one half of a couple, committing joint crimes. Will’s found nothing in his head or Doctor Sosa’s details to suggest an accomplice.

The killer’s left no trace of useful evidence on the bodies, and there haven’t been any witnesses to the abductions, even the later ones with parents on high alert. He’ll be at the more intelligent end of the serial murderer scale, definitely one of the half who completed their basic education. He’ll have an occupation that’s at least semi-skilled, so Will’s not here to study the janitorial staff. There’s the possibility a smart psychopath might get himself inside the building as an imposter, but the cleaning crew won’t be in the press room during the actual briefing. Before and after won’t be close enough for this guy; he’ll need to be right there, watching everything.

Psychopaths or not, the killer’s unlikely to be a journalist. The profession attracts a different subset, on the whole, just as manipulative and charming, but generally at the non-violent end of the spectrum. They like to live vicariously.

He’ll be a narcissist, obviously, and if he _was_ writing about his own murders, he’d already be a suspect. The temptation to write too much, to add in the extra details nobody knew and see if anybody even _noticed_ would be irresistible. There’s only ever been one serial killer journalist (only one who was caught anyway, always the necessary amendment), and he made the obvious mistake. There was a second killer who became a journalist after his release from jail, but Will’s not counting him in this context.

His target won’t be masquerading as one of the press pack today, either. He can’t use Will’s ruse, because unlike Will, he’s already been to at least one of these gatherings and he’s planning on a whole lot more. Journalists are intrinsically curious, and practically compelled to get people talking; he couldn’t circulate regularly in that crowd without the others asking questions about his job, what he’s written, who he knows, and evasion wouldn’t work. It would only attract the attention of a room full of piranhas.

Will’s decided he’s not going to be spying too hard on the people wielding audio recorders today, and that’s fortunate, or the piranhas might eat him too.

The murderer could be affiliated with the police (a cop serial killer definitely wouldn’t be a first), but if that’s the case, Will’s pretty much fucked from the start. The force attracts petty psychopaths, low level sadists who just love to order people around and beat on them with impunity. Will knew a few of those back in Louisiana. He could probably pick out a handful of antisocial personalities in uniform on this one floor of the building alone, and be no closer to his killer. Even if he got an actual ID, tracking and disposing of law enforcement would add unwanted difficulties to his plans. It makes more sense to concentrate on the possibilities that aren’t nearly impossible to pursue.

There are other people in that room, who aren’t columnists or police; the technical types who control the lighting and the computer that shows photos and videos of the reconstruction of Abril’s disappearance, the camera operators for the various media companies. People whose intelligence and job skills fall wholly within the parameters of Will’s profile, and nobody in that tense, crowded space will be looking at any of them, a layer of effective invisibility that would be perfect for a killer. Will’s planning to pay really close attention to the background that everyone else will ignore.

He swipes his finger around his phone screen, composing a meaningless email that’s not going anywhere, and scans the people moving along the hallway. Traffic’s picking up now, more reporters filing in, singly and in small groups, some of them making tasteless jokes as they pass. It doesn’t mean anything sinister. Morbid humour’s practically a prerequisite of the work, and Will’s heard it all from the forensics teams at the BAU. 

There are a few more cops heading into the room alongside the journalists; not the political chiefs who’ll be doing the talking, just the guys working security and keeping an eye on the hordes of reporters. One of them gives Will instant bad vibes, taut and straight-backed in his uniform, hard eyes settling on everyone in the hallway, and Will feels it tingle in his skin as that gaze passes over him. This guy’s just _waiting_ for one of the visitors to get out of line so he can slap them back behind it, but it’s only what Will had predicted he’d find here.

The cop moves on into the room, and Will’s senses reset once he’s out of sight. Most of the press pack are inside now, the hallway emptying, and he drops his email pretence, sliding the phone back into his pocket. Another policeman’s headed his way, one who walks casually and doesn’t tug at Will’s hackles, who stops and says, “You lost? Seems like you’re stranded out here.”

Will twists up his face and flicks his eyes to the restroom door across the hall. “Stomach bug. I’ve got the shits so bad it shoots out of me like a fire hose, and I don’t get much warning,” he says in rapid Spanish.

The cop’s expression changes to mirror Will’s. “Sucks to be you, huh?”

Will gives him a faint, crooked smile. “Today, it does.”

“Well, wash your damn hands, then. Don’t need you spreading it through the station.”

Will laughs and nods his head. “Will do.”

The cop wanders off along the hallway, and Will turns his head to watch him go. Rounded shoulders beneath his shirt, hands swinging loose at his sides, slight brush and squeak of his shoes on the epoxy floor – everything about him reads relaxed and bored, and Will’s muscles loosen up too. 

He practiced that conversation with Hannibal, who tutored him in all the relevant colourful colloquialisms, until Will spoke with the effortless rhythm of a man who’s lived in Argentina a lot longer than he has. He could roll out considerably more than a couple of sentences if he had to, but the subject matter was chosen to deter further questions, as well as being situationally convincing.

Will shrugs himself away from the wall and joins the last few strays making their way into the media room. The rows of seats are nearly full now, a low level background chatter vibrating through the air, the spaces round the edges of the room lined with tripods and cameras. The chairs up on the platform are still empty, but it won’t be long before this thing kicks off.

He finds himself a spot free of cameras along a side wall, where he has a good view of the podium and the ability to scan the room without anyone’s eyes pointing at him. He takes the new phone from his pocket, ready to hold out as an audio recorder when the others do. His story about digestive issues will explain why he’s standing way back here instead of jammed into one of the seats, if anyone gets nosey.

The jabbered conversations start dying away when the door beside the platform opens, the police chief and his sidekicks filing through in immaculately pressed formal uniforms. The leader steps up to the podium and pauses for silence, while the others take seats, waiting their turn.

Will tunes out the words when the talking starts, and sets to studying the room in earnest.

The atmosphere’s grown claustrophobic, shrinking in as the people morph from a number of small, clustered groups with separate thoughts into a single, intent mass. Will braces against it, erects a mental partition around the susceptible part of his mind, and begins methodically breaking the collective herd back down into individuals.

His sadist cop’s off to one side of the platform, holding himself more stiffly at attention than the others assigned here, radiating a level of dedicated zeal that’s unusual for this kind of duty. His eyes are constantly roving the ranks of seated reporters facing him, settling on each individual for just a little too long before moving on. He’s totally fixated on the press, though, zero interest in what’s going on with the speeches and the powerpoint, and Will made that call right. 

He looks away, and resolves to keep his gaze out of that particular corner of the room from now on. He doesn’t want to invite any return scrutiny from that source.

For the next five minutes or so, he lets his eyes wander. 

He’s not running a systematic search pattern – that would be an obvious oddity if anyone’s watching. He’s keeping his face turned to the podium like he’s actually paying attention, while he scans around the people, especially those in the background, lining the walls.

Each time his eyes sweep the room, they catch in the same place, on the same man, and after a few rounds with the same result, Will narrows focus.

There’s no one thing that triggers it. Everything’s subtle, and _everything’s_ wrong. Will can’t even see half of his face, blocked from this angle by his video camera on its tripod, but he can see the movements of his head, the direction of his eyes, and he breaks the pattern.

The other guys with cameras are fixed on their screens, total concentration on framing and exposure, invested in the images they’re catching, not the room. This one looks at his camera, there’s interest there, but his gaze is always straying to the platform, to watch directly, because the separation of the screen is intrusive, that same break in connection that flashed as insight in Will’s reconstruction. 

The angle makes it hard to tell, but Will’s not sure he’s looking at the podium, at the police chief who’s making his speech. His eyes might be searching behind, drawn to the door. He’s definitely restless, too much shifting of weight from foot to foot, but that could be explained by some kind of low grade chronic pain issue, lumbar discs or a cruciate injury.

Will runs another check on the room, roaming around it a few more times with his eyes because he wouldn’t want to miss anything, but he always falls back on the same end point.

The door by the platform opens again, and the mood in the room shifts as a man and a woman not in police uniform step up, They come to the podium, whichever relatives of the missing girl volunteered for this, his hand on her arm, and there’s pin-drop silence when he starts speaking.

He won’t have anything interesting to say. He’ll say exactly what the psychiatrists told him to say, some subtle variation on what the last parents said, and it won’t help their kid any more than it helped the others. And it sure as hell won’t help Will if he starts getting sucked into that black pit of misery and desperation – he needs his head clear for a different signal.

Will’s actively trying to screen it all out, but his guy with the video camera across the room… he’s gone full focus. He’s stepped slightly away from the camera for an unobstructed view. His eyes never waver for a second, and he’s not looking at the door now, he’s not even glancing at the screen to frame or zoom. Every muscle is taut and unmoving except for the heightened rise and fall of his breath.

He’s transfixed. Will wasn’t wrong about the tunnel vision.

There’s a thin sheen of sweat along his forehead now, in this room that’s air conditioned to sixty-eight degrees. He could be sick like Will’s claiming to be, but he doubts it.

Will studies him more deliberately, while there’s no chance of the man staring back. Maybe mid-late thirties, around Will’s height, built a little bulkier, but not fat. His arms aren’t huge below his sleeves, probably reasonable physical fitness but nothing to indicate he’s an athlete. Everything suggests he’ll be… controllable.

He’s wearing a media pass, identical to Will’s. He needs to get close enough to read it. That won’t be happening until the conference ends and people start moving around in here.

He looks over the rest of the room a couple more times during this performance highlight, adding certainty. The press pack are all paying attention, near-silence beneath the miked up speech, with only the faintest rustles and breathing of a hundred people to disturb it, but there’s no-one that grabs at Will like his camera guy.

He settles himself fully against the wall again, satisfied. He still holds his phone towards the platform, inhabiting his adopted role, but mentally he’s edging out of the room. He’s not going anywhere till the speeches are over, and neither is his target across the way, and until then he needs to keep the oppressive creeping tension out of his head. 

Will hasn’t been around a crowd like this in the better part of a year, not since he went Christmas shopping last December (shopping for Molly and Walter, just ten months ago, still believing then that he could make them his life if he only wanted it hard enough, if he ignored the other things he wanted more). Crowds are exhausting, worse when they’re all emoting synchronously, and this room’s a revolving back-eddy of morbid curiosity and horrified sympathy, with a surface layer of tense expectation as they all wait for the lead quote of the day. It’s spiralling around him, waiting to suck him down into a whirlpool if the barriers drop, if he lets it in.

He’s not going to let it in.

He centres inside his head, to the peace of the house, to his dogs chasing hares over the lawn, to Hannibal sitting at the piano, filling the room with a gentle cascade of flowing sound. He’s Will Graham, and he knows exactly who and where he is, and where he intends to be.

There’s more to the conference, more talking, more pictures of Abril Arias and her last known location. Will’s aware of the process, peripherally; he knows the format. He’s keeping tabs on one level, and he’s perceptive of the behaviours around him, enough to be sure that nobody’s looking at _him._ He’s just careful not to be receptive.

Not until the microphone falls silent and the press room erupts in a buzz of questions.

His eyes go instantly to his target. His frame’s relaxed now, only a hint of perspiration lingering under the lights. He’s suddenly a lot more attentive of his camera, his hands on it, adjusting it with a touch that’s almost a caress. The wave of consummate satisfaction settles heavy into Will’s head, palpable across fifty feet of space.

He redirects his gaze to the podium, to the police chief answering the journalists, mindful of Hannibal’s comment about the void looking back. 

The time allotted for questions is limited, specified beforehand, and Will scans around the other side of the room, looking for an excuse, something near his killer but not too close. When he finds it, he too can relax, nothing to do now but wait for the media circus to end.

As the police chief turns away from the microphone, the room bursts into noise, with chatter and the tapping of phone keys, and there’s a mass exodus of writers from the rows of seats. Will joins the flow of them initially, then redirects himself away from the door, across to the other side of the room, on a line that passes by his target.

The man’s distracted now, working with his equipment, removing the video camera from its tripod and stowing it in the gear bag by his feet. Will’s taking something of a risk, getting close, but it’s a small one, based on the killer’s attention to his apparatus and his earlier tunnel vision. The likelihood that he noticed Will, that he spent the entire conference on the opposite wall of the room, is slim.

He walks by him when he’s crouched down at his gear bag, and Will bends to pick up a nearly empty water bottle from the floor at the end of a row of vacated chairs. Will turns back to his target as they both straighten, the killer starting to collapse his tripod, and his eyes go the pass hanging from his shirt, to the name written there in bold black letters. Gabriel Calvo.

Will sets his feet towards the exit door, follows the last of the journalists out into the hallway, and joins the group still waiting for the elevators. 

He keeps his head down towards his phone, letting his hair fall forward over his face, obscuring himself in a mess of curls. There’s a tension rising in his gut, twisting tighter when he packs into the confined space with the media hounds for the journey down. It’s oddly similar to the feeling he had that first time walking away from Hannibal’s cell in the BSHCI, only it might almost be worse, because this time he has an entire press room of potential pursuing stalkers, even if none of them have a hundredth of Hannibal’s magnetic pull.

Down in the parking garage, he waits for his group of temporary companions to disperse before he tugs his gloves back on and moves the Fiat to a vacated space in a central spot from where he can watch the elevator doors. The name Gabriel Calvo might be real, or it might not. Will’s not going to count on it.

The visitor parking is all on this level, so Calvo will have a vehicle here too. He’s got video equipment to haul around, and if he’s a real news cameraman, his material’s time sensitive, so he won’t be taking public transport. If he’s not, he’s still a murderer in the lions’ den, just as Hannibal said, and when the predators open their eyes and notice him, he won’t want to be waiting at the bus stop outside.

Will was never planning to go home directly from police headquarters anyway. If he was recognised up there, it’s inconvenient. If he leads anyone back to Hannibal, it’s utter devastation wreaked on themselves, and on anyone else who gets too close. He’s sure he wasn’t noticed or followed, but the vague coils of nausea rolling through his stomach at the ramifications won’t be convinced he’s sure _enough._ Tailing Calvo seems like an excellent way to fill more of the afternoon.

Calvo leaves the elevator a few minutes later with his bag of camera gear and loads it into a grey Toyota SW4 SUV. Will starts up the Fiat when the Toyota’s lights come on, and crawls along the one-way lane between the rows of cars. There are two exits from the parking, one leading onto the street to the west and one to the east. Will can’t predict, he has to follow.

Will’s pleased when Calvo takes the western exit then heads just half a block south, making the right onto Avenida Colón. It’s the main arterial through this district, and following him without arousing suspicion is easy, lots of traffic and most of it going some distance.

Will wonders where Calvo’s taking him, if he’s going to lead him to where he’s keeping Abril Arias. 

This killer’s felt his power today; he’s experienced it right at the peak of its most exquisite freshness. The children mean nothing to him as themselves, but he might want to look now upon the source of his power, to gaze at his lever as his recalls his accomplishment, what they asked him for and what he’ll deny them.

They head west maybe three miles before Calvo makes a left into the web of smaller neighbourhood streets. Traffic’s lighter here, but the Toyota’s big, and easily seen, while Will in the compact Fiat can drop just a couple of cars back and be invisible to Calvo’s mirrors. As long as they maintain speed, Calvo’s still there ahead of him. When the car in front of him brakes, Will just has to glance towards the side streets to check if Calvo made a turn. The roads here form a roughly regular grid, so wherever he’s going, there won’t be many deviations. 

The Toyota pulls over to park a few blocks later, on a street that’s a mix of small shops and low-rise brick and concrete apartments. Will drives on by and takes the next left, stopping just beyond the corner. He hops from the car and watches from beside the building as Calvo and his camera bag disappear into the door of a small apartment block.

Will takes the Fiat through a series of left turns, working with the one-way streets until he’s back on the right one. He parks fifty feet or so down from the Toyota, pulls out his phone for the day and sets the camera to full zoom, zeroing in on the building. There are bars over every window below the third floor, but it’s not really a statement about the current character of the neighbourhood – it’s common enough on buildings this age in Córdoba. He’s watching for any sign of movement, any indication of which apartment his target might be in. 

Calvo makes it easy for him. He appears fully framed by a balcony door on the second floor, and then he pulls the drapes across, even though it’s still only mid-afternoon.

He’s shutting out the light. He’s going to watch what he filmed.

No, it’s more than that; Will knows it instantly, knows the killer he’s felt in his head. Calvo wants his video to be perfect, precise with no extraneous clutter or distractions. He’s going to watch it, and then he’s going to edit it.

Will taps his gloved fingers against the steering wheel, running the scenarios and options through. He knows where to find his killer now, but that’s only one half of the answers he needs. Calvo clearly isn’t keeping Abril Arias in his city apartment, and Will’s still hopeful that he might lead him somewhere else today. And if Calvo does make another trip, he can’t tail him twice in the same car.

Calvo won’t be sloppy with his footage. This will be an exercise in frame by frame choices and incremental audio adjustments. If filming really is his profession (and Will’s instincts say it is, whether for the news or not), he’ll have the full professional grade editing tools. Will figures he has some time. 

He opens maps on the phone, and starts a search.

He leaves the Fiat near a central shopping area, switching the real plates back in, because kids stealing cars for kicks don’t usually mess with those. He checks the parking lot for cameras and angles, and finds a late nineties Ford that works. He’s back along the street from Calvo’s apartment barely thirty minutes after he left, and the drapes are still closed.

This is when it gets boring, and Will finds himself wishing he’d stopped to buy a snack at some point today.

He props his phone against the dash and periodically pokes at the screen, enough to deflect any interest in the guy sitting for long periods in a parked vehicle. He keeps indirect watch via the camera, scanning the other windows of the apartment in case Calvo’s moving around in there, but nothing changes for almost an hour. 

When something does happen, it’s Calvo opening the drapes again, then stepping away. 

Will checks the other windows, fast, repeated, but there’s nothing, Nothing until a couple of minutes later, and Calvo’s leaving the main door of the building, walking to his car.

This time he doesn’t have the camera bag. Wherever he’s going, it’s not for work.

When the Toyota pulls out of the parking spot, Will lets a couple of cars go by before he joins the traffic to follow. 

Calvo drives north again to rejoin Avenida Colón, heading further out of Córdoba. Will moves between the lanes of traffic, varying his distance from the Toyota and using larger vehicles to keep himself out of Calvo’s sight. A few times he even gets ahead of him, keeping track of the grey SUV in his mirrors in case he makes a turn. If he did, Will would take the next one way street running parallel, and work his way back to him, but he doesn’t. He follows the arterial beyond the city ring road, and then they’re on the major route heading west towards Lago San Roque, and beyond that out into the Sierras. 

Will’s suddenly very aware of his heartbeat; it’s only a little faster but a whole lot stronger within his ribs, because this is it. This is the jackpot run. Now he’s going to find where Calvo hides his victims. 

His certainty increases when the Toyota turns west on route 28 out of Carlos Paz. His eyes flick down to the fuel gauge in the dash – he doesn’t want to get himself stranded out here. It’s reading a little under half.

His anticipation notches still higher as the outskirts of Tanti disappear from his mirrors ten miles later. They’re finally leaving the last of civilisation. There’s nothing but mountains and scattered rural villages between here and the Chilean border.

Will backs off the gas a little, letting Calvo draw further in front when the traffic thins. His head surges with the possibilities as he’s driving, the choice that awaits him so very soon, because he could _kill_ this killer, here, today, _now._

He’s not armed. He chose not to bring a weapon, not worth the risk of finding trouble at police headquarters, but he doesn’t need one. It’s in his mind, all the ways he could do it; the details of how it would feel and sound, slamming this man’s face against the steel frame of the Toyota, blood arcing in a fine spray with every impact, the crack of the bones in his skull beneath Will’s hands, and he wants to, he _wants_ to, the urge a living thing with claws, trying to rip its way out of his chest and into the flesh of someone who deserves it.

He hasn’t any proof. He knows he’s right, but he’s got nothing. _’It’s a funny thing, doubt.’_ Words he said to Jack years ago, and some things about Will don’t change. But if he is right, and he did it now, Abril Arias might never be found, starving alone into dust in whatever deserted place allows a killer to hide a child away from anything human.

Those aren’t the only reasons Will won’t do it. They’re good reasons that make sense in his head. It’s solid logic. But Will is also shiveringly aware that Hannibal has to be there. He has to see Will, to watch and see every exposed, brutal aspect of him, and love what he sees.

He’s cognisant of the implicit pathology, running a little deeper than his lifelong inclination towards violent justice, but society would define the complexities of his entire relationship with Hannibal as pathological. To Will, its tenacity and finely balanced symmetry are proof that it’s not. They love beyond the typical boundaries, in some respects, but Will only wants his partner to know him, and embrace him without reservation, and that’s natural for lovers.

Will’s been dropping back ever since they left the towns, keeping the Toyota barely in sight on the straights, losing it again with every bend. There’s little traffic now, nobody behind him, only the occasional car passing the other way, and when Calvo turns off the highway some fifteen miles later and heads up a narrow, climbing road, Will holds his speed and drives straight on. 

If he’s not going to kill him today, he can’t tail him any further. There’s no way not to be noticed.

He checks the map on the phone, making sure he knows exactly where Calvo left route 28, and then he drives until he finds a place to turn around. 

He keeps the Ford steady, exactly on the speed limit, tautly aware of the disappointment that crawls in his stomach. He’d already made his decision, and he has his reasons, but he still _could_ have while he had him in sight.

He makes frequent scans of his mirrors, but he seems to be alone out here. 

Traffic picks up again when he gets back to the towns, and the area around Lago San Roque. He takes a side road, and finds a place to park a quarter mile along, lets the cars pass on by for five minutes before he starts moving again. 

He’s being paranoid, and he knows it. He’s seen nobody react to him the whole day, and there’s been no suggestion of a tail. There are more remote methods of surveillance, but this car isn’t coming home with him, and his real phone has its battery pulled.

Knowing he’s paranoid doesn’t ease the feeling in any way. The consequences of being wrong are catastrophic.

He stops by a bridge to toss today’s phone over the wall into the water, and then he flips the Ford around and back onto the main road, heading into the city again to find an internet café. Some things he’s not going to search for from home, even via an anonymised IP address.

The name Gabriel Calvo turns out to be real. He even has a website.

He’s not linked to any media group in particular, he’s a freelancer, selling his footage to anyone who’ll pay him for it. That gives him the freedom to move around, and minimises his exposure to curious colleagues.

If Will had stray doubts before, they’re gone now. Calvo had no financial incentive to be at the conference; nobody was going to buy that film when every news organisation in Argentina had their own camera in the room. The footage he shot today was purely for personal enjoyment.

Beyond that confirmation, there’s little of interest. Other hits on his name link only to credits for his work, and his social media site is basically one long self-promotion as a cameraman for hire. If there’s anything more personal, it’s under lock, but it would be consistent with the patterns for him to be lacking genuine friendships.

Will’s never been unaware that the pattern’s true of himself as well.

He finds nothing to connect Calvo or his business name to any other property besides the apartment. He pokes around increasingly obscure links for another thirty minutes before he clears his search history, no closer to finding Abril Arias.

He’s not done here yet, though, because his choices reach beyond where or how Will’s going to kill Gabriel Calvo. There’s something more he needs to research, something that’s been chewing at the ends of his nerves all day, and he spends another hour with Wikipedia and maps, figuring out the details before he leaves.

He doesn’t go back to the Ford, which has probably been flagged as stolen by now. He takes the bus to the suburban town where he left the Mercedes, nearly ten hours ago.

The ride is slow and dull, and nobody’s paying attention to the guy with the dishevelled curls who makes his way along towards the rear. He pulls a sweater from his backpack, folds it between his scarred cheek and the window, and appears to doze off, keeping watch on the other passengers through his eyelashes.

When he leaves the bus in Carlos Paz, he walks a couple of blocks over before he slides the battery back into his phone and turns it on to check for any messages. He and Hannibal are cautious about minimising their electronic signals in the world – Will’s keenly aware of how intrusive national security types can be – but he wouldn’t want to miss it if Hannibal had called to say, ‘Location compromised, don’t come back.’

There’s nothing, and he shuts it down again.

He strolls the streets around the Mercedes a couple of times, sees nothing out of the ordinary and nobody circling with him, so he blips the remote to open it and makes the short drive home.

The dogs run over to greet him, massing round his ankles as he gets out of the car. He talks to them and rubs their heads, but he doesn’t stop walking, because it’s not the dogs he needs to see.

He opens the door and Hannibal’s there in the hallway. His body’s still while his eyes flash over Will, cataloguing, absorbing in the moments before he moves, and then they’re wrapped tight into one another, kissing all the energy and tension through each other with pressing lips and sliding tongues. Hannibal’s fingers grip around Will’s elbows, and he tips his head forward alongside Will’s, his nose brushing his ear and his breath fanning over his neck, and Will stills and angles his face to let him.

Hannibal did this a lot when Will first came here, inhaling him carefully and steadily. Whatever the detail level of Hannibal’s mind palace, Will doubts it includes much in the way of scents, and this is how Hannibal cements the reality of Will into his current mental landscape, after years of living with his reconstructed ghost.

Hannibal draws his face back with an expression of faint distaste. “Perhaps next time you could discard the repugnant air freshener from the vehicle after you procure it.”

Will had noticed a smell, and a patterned disc clipped to the air vent of the Ford, but his day’s been occupied with bigger priorities. He leans away a little more and eyes Hannibal in open curiosity. “To your nose, I stink like a pack of dogs every day. Is it really so much worse?”

“You smelled of dogs when I met you, Will,” Hannibal says easily. “You always have. My mental associations of that particular scent with you have rendered it acceptable.”

Will laughs, and it lingers into a teasing grin. “That never seemed to work with my aftershave.”

“I find artificial scents are more intrusive than natural ones,” Hannibal says, “but I wasn’t entirely unaffected.” A muscle tightens in his cheek, and the next breath he takes is heavier. “When you first came to see me in the institute, your aftershave was when I knew, and my reaction was in no way negative.” His eyes appear to magnify in Will’s vision, deepening wells of desire and longing, his fingers tightening on his skin. “I hadn’t forgotten on an intellectual level how vital you are, but I failed to anticipate the precise impact of merely having you walk into the room.”

Will understands that, he knows it, he felt it, because he was there, frozen in that space of reflections, looking through the glass at Hannibal’s back, at his unnaturally cropped hair and appalling prison clothing. He stood there waiting for Hannibal to turn, the seconds strung out endless in his need to see, because he _had to see_ , paralysed between the craving and an exquisite dread of the transformation that would be triggered when their eyes connected. _And Hannibal starts to turn, he’s turning, his cheekbone stark like a blade in the lights as his profile swings, his eyelashes, then his nose, and everything’s scrawled across his face that was written there three years before, it’s still there –_

and it’s still there now, it’s always there, and Will leans forwards to kiss him again, this man he shattered and rebuilt, just as Hannibal did with him. Hannibal meets him, and more than meets him, and Will has the wall against his back now with the press of him.

It’s natural and immediate now to do this – he wants to kiss Hannibal, so he does, whether it’s a brief brush of lips in the kitchen while they’re cooking, or something that lingers in invitation. It’s become an active process, to recall the years when this ease didn’t exist, when wanting this was _pain_ , a jagged, raw tear between his ribs that didn’t heal.

He pulls away from Hannibal’s lips and slides his hand down below his belt, to the erection filling the fabric there, and he watches Hannibal’s eyes change, widening and fixing in lust. Will’s been here six months, and it hasn’t dulled for him yet, the effect he has on Hannibal with one blatantly intimate touch.

He gives a small smile and steps sideways along the wall, a quick shake of his head. “I should take a shower.”

Hannibal’s hand on Will’s arm curls tighter. “You should do that later.” 

It’s not really a suggestion, and if Hannibal can deal with the way he smells, it’s not going to bother Will. “Oh, I’ll definitely need one later,” he says, and he pulls at Hannibal’s shirt, tugging it loose, his fingers seeking out the man beneath it. He’s spent the day surrounded by knowledge and a hundred vivid possibilities, the aftermath of a small mistake or just plain bad luck that could drag all of this away from him, and touching now is a necessary affirmation. Hannibal’s skin is warm, soft over the solidity of muscle, and a heavy nose is bumping at his thigh while someone small enough to be Sarah is winding between their legs.

“Bedroom.” Hannibal’s tone is flat, his lack of eloquence saying everything, and Will lets himself be towed along the hallway, careful not to trip over the furry obstacles underfoot. 

The dogs relent at the stairs, as they’re trained to, but Hannibal keeps his hold on Will’s wrist all the way to their room, only releasing him when he needs his hands free to strip him. He peels Will’s clothes from him with systematic efficiency, and Will knows his mood and reciprocates the same way.

Will’s had his share of stressful moments today, but he’s been actively _doing_ things, working through a series of plans, aimed towards a very specific goal. Hannibal won’t have left the house except to pick a tomato from the garden to go with his lunch; he’ll have spent much of his time in the armchair, too wired to relax, too trapped in his thoughts to read or compose. Will pulls him down to the bed with him and lies back in a full stretch, wordlessly inviting Hannibal to fuck him, because Hannibal needs a vent to release a whole day’s build of tension, and Will’s going to enjoy being his outlet. There are no stresses here, in this bedroom, nothing except them, and what they are to each other.

Sometimes Hannibal touches Will with such careful delicacy, such gentle devotion that Will doesn’t feel like a china teacup, he feels like an outsized Ming vase, or more fittingly, one of the menacing historical devices Hannibal handled with curator’s gloves at the Capponi.

That isn’t the Hannibal he’s with now. This is Hannibal pressing Will into the sheets and sucking hard, bruising marks into his skin as he pushes wetly seeking fingers inside him, and Will bends and lifts his thighs to let him. Hannibal’s eyes glitter at him. “Yes, Will, just like that, for me,” and his fingers thrust deeper, and Will shivers at the suddenness of the stretch and grasps behind his knees, curling himself further into it.

Hannibal would never have touched Alana this way; he would have demonstrated full and generous consideration with her, every time. Bedelia, well, she could have been into just about anything behind that poised veneer, and Will’s not inclined to speculate, but Hannibal would have been solicitous in giving her exactly what she chose, and only a little more, just to check her boundaries.

Will doesn’t get a calculating façade. Will gets Hannibal, all the fluctuating, impulsive reality of him, and he’ll take every piece he can find and come back to take the rest of him, because Hannibal is entirely Will’s, the same way that Will is Hannibal’s. He’ll take Hannibal possessive, demanding and unrestrained, and take him with enthusiasm, because Will didn’t fall for any of the socially acceptable people he met in his life, he fell recklessly, unstoppably in love with a man who suffers no self-imposed limitations on behaviour, whose eager embrace of his own urges loosened all the constraints that lay coiled around Will.

Hannibal fucks him now the way he loves him, acquisitive, single-minded, covetous, and Will absorbs every implication of it while his body embraces the force of it, and he relishes the commitment. It’s effortless, the easy alignment of their mutual greed, and Will can lose himself to this intensely physical expression of Hannibal’s nature while Hannibal takes what he needs in Will. He can rise out of all the debris in his head and exist in the sensations, of Hannibal inside him, Hannibal on him and all around him, here against his skin, where Will needs him to be. Hannibal fucks him selfishly, not especially harsh, but purposeful, very much to an end, and that end comes with Hannibal panting out his name, shuddering and gasping through the movements and into stillness.

Will unhooks his legs from over Hannibal’s shoulders, because his hips definitely weren’t designed to do that for long, and he grasps his own cock and locks his eyes with Hannibal’s beneath the sweat-damp fall of his hair. He jerks himself quickly through the strokes he needs to finish, feet planted and arching himself higher into Hannibal as he does.

He sags back onto the sheets and pillows, his muscles soft like jello, blinking slow and lazy and gloriously content in the aftermath of orgasm. Hannibal’s wet, softening cock has slipped from Will’s body with his movements, but Hannibal’s still leaning close over him, breathing heavy with the exertion, and he doesn’t let go. Even when he does, he never will, and that knowledge is Will’s stability. His life has shifted unrecognisably, multiple times over the last five years, and the only constant in it all has been Hannibal and his feelings for Will, unshakable no matter what Will did to him, through everything they did to each other.

Hannibal stays stretched over him, his weight on one arm as the other curls fingers tight into Will’s hair, and Will sees the outline of the wendigo framed in the black of his pupils. “You would let me do anything.”

Will slides his tongue over his lip and smiles at him. “No,” he says flatly. “I wouldn’t. But I’m inclined to be flexible on the details of how we have sex.”

Hannibal gives a soft, breathy laugh and sits back onto his heels. “You found him.” It’s not a question. Hannibal read it in him down in the hallway, before they even touched.

“It wasn’t hard.” There’s more to come that might be, because they need information, the details to formulate a strategy that minimises risk, and Abril Arias’ ticking timer is a messy complication factoring into that. Before any of it, though, there’s another priority, an absence that’s been vibrating along Will’s nerves all day, because when they do this, they’ll be risking more than their confrontation with a killer.

Will pushes himself upright, shifting back over the mattress until he’s propped against the pillows, shoves the loose, sweaty curls out of his face. “We need a plan. When it all goes wrong, if we’re running, we can’t run together.” And maybe it will be only one of them running and one in a cell, but they can’t plan for that. “You said Colombia.”

Hannibal nods, slow and barely perceptible, his eyes curious. “It was on my list of considerations, before I decided we would both enjoy living here.”

“I did some checking while I was in town. Medellín, El Laboratorio de Café, on the Plaza Botero. Three pm on the eighth, nineteenth and twenty-eighth of every month. Wait forty minutes.” The city’s reminiscent of Córdoba, large but not the biggest, with a university and history and culture to keep Hannibal occupied if Will has to detour. The coffee shop’s touristy enough that no accent will stand out, and picking dates not days makes for a less obvious pattern.

Hannibal settles his hand against Will’s neck, no movement, just contact. “Yes.” He doesn’t question Will’s choices, and he won’t forget, and it’s odd sometimes where the trust exists in their relationship and where it falls through the gaps.

They’ll need more than that eventually, but it’s a start. They’ll need back-up plans for the back-up plan, a system of coded communications and pre-planted storage locations for papers, because their choices aren’t sustainable, and the logistics of evading a massive manhunt across international borders are almost overwhelming. It only needs one of them to remain free, in the end; everything else can be corrected from there.

Will closes his eyes for a moment, grounding himself in the rhythm of their breathing, the way they move air in and out together, the feel of Hannibal against his skin. And then he opens them again, because he can feel a lot more than that on his skin, and his comment in the hallway wasn’t wrong. “I really do need to take that shower now,” he says, and he’s smiling despite the intrusive stickiness.

Hannibal’s hand stays on Will’s body. “I’ll join you.” That jagged edge of strain hasn’t been eliminated by sex; Hannibal’s still fixed on him like Will might vanish if they break contact.

Will twines their fingers together, tugging Hannibal after him as he slides from the bed, and his grin is wide and inviting. “I guess that means dinner’s going to be late tonight.”

He hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and he’s hungry, and it turns out he doesn’t much care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always felt this chapter was going to be the long, hard slog to write, and I wasn't wrong. It's difficult writing someone tracking and tailing someone else without it turning out deathly boring to read, but editing it is no longer helping, so I'm done. The next chapter has actual things happening in it, I promise. The pace will pick up!


	5. Chapter 5

Will gets back to his search the next morning, using online maps to close in on the climbing road that Calvo took from the highway. Knowing where his target lives is a start, but it’s information of tactically limited value. A city apartment’s no place to commit a murder, at least not the kind that Will intends. Whatever isolated place Calvo is hiding his victims will make a suitable location for Will’s project too.

There’s a sense of disquiet sliding inside him with the idea of Abril Arias left alone and terrified while he studies her would-be killer, but he doesn’t see a practical alternative. If he sacrificed his own intentions, made an anonymous tip to the police about Gabriel Calvo, there’s unlikely to be any evidence of what he is in that apartment, and even if there’s proof, Calvo has no motivation to tell them where he’s holding her. He won’t be cutting a deal for reduced time, not on four-rising-five child homicides. He may not get to see it and film it, but leaving her family to suffer knowing Abril is dying slowly in isolation would be his final accomplishment.

Abril Arias is safest with Calvo loose, until she’s not, and that’s still three days away. 

Will’s entirely comfortable with that part of his assessment. The one day variation in when the bodies show up is introduced by when they’re found, not when they’re killed. The two victims discovered a day later had been cold for nearly twenty-four hours.

The map shows the road forking several times as it climbs, but they all dead end eventually, and there’s only the one outlet to the highway. There’s a hamlet of four or five houses a little ways up the road, and a few more individual farmhouses dotted around. Will immediately discounts the village – small, tight-knit communities where everyone knows their neighbours are the kind of places people notice noises coming from a house when its owners aren’t home. Calvo isn’t drugging the kids, their systems are all clean on autopsy. Maybe he dopes them when he takes them, but he’s not keeping them quiet with chemicals the whole two weeks.

The farmhouses are certainly possibilities, but Will’s not narrowing himself down to those just yet. Nobody sent a street view camera that far out into rural nowhere, and the satellite views don’t give him enough detail. They’re low res, and while the higher mountain slopes are exposed rock, the river valley is mainly treetops that could be obscuring a great deal of interest at ground level. 

There’s a lot of empty space out there in the Sierras, but Will figures Calvo has to be staying near the roads. If he’s carrying a terrified kid in one direction and a messy corpse in the other, he’s not hiking miles across the hillsides, he’s sticking close to the vehicle. Calvo’s Toyota is an SUV, though, mid-high ground clearance and all-wheel drive, which does open up a few more options. For their next outing, Will’s going to steal something similar, just in case Calvo’s taking a goat track.

Not for the first time, he finds himself thinking how much easier this would be with FBI resources. A quick check of property records for Calvo and his family might be all he’d need. A cell tower triangulation on his phone pings would be gold, if there’s actually a signal where he goes.

Hannibal moves up behind his chair, his hands dropping to Will’s shoulders. Will sits back from his hunched position glaring at the screen, closing his eyes and leaning into the touch as Hannibal’s fingers begin working into his muscles. “We’re not going to find it this way,” he admits.

“So we’ll find it another way,” Hannibal says, light and unconcerned. 

Will’s certain they will. He and Hannibal combined are capable of a great many things. The only question in his head is if they can find it in three days. 

Hannibal doesn’t care if they save the girl. Hannibal only wants Will to kill, and Will’s going to do that whether they trace Abril in time or not.

It doesn’t bother Will that Hannibal doesn’t care. Hannibal loves Will, and that’s the non-negotiable core of everything. His feelings towards the rest of the human race don’t factor in. Will reaches his left hand back over his shoulder to grip around Hannibal’s forearm, feeling the movement of his muscles beneath cloth and skin, stroking encouragement as Hannibal massages serenity and calm all through him. 

He’ll keep on looking, dig a little deeper through the online trails of Calvo’s life, but he also sets his mind on a different path, the options for if he turns up nothing. It would be ideal to reach Abril ahead of Calvo, to get the jump on him from the start, but he and Hannibal have the skills to make this work in other ways too. 

It’s only a matter of exactly how to apply them.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Three days later, he’s back in the neighbourhood of Calvo’s apartment, parked along the street from the grey SW4, keeping watch. He’s come prepared for a long wait this time, with drinks and snacks on the passenger seat of his newly appropriated Toyota pickup, even an empty bottle he can piss in if it gets that far, but Calvo makes a start mid-morning, so Will’s only bored and restless for a few hours.

When he appears, he’s not carrying the big gear bag of cameras and tripods, but a smaller duffel, and a rolled up sheet of plastic. Will calls Hannibal’s number for the day, letting it ring four times before he hangs up and switches off the phone.

He watches Calvo load the car, and his heart thumps hard and steady within his ribs.

He lets the SUV pull away and out of sight – there’s no need to follow and risk spooking him when he knows where he’s going. Will’s battered red Hilux is bigger and more noticeable than his preferred choice of tail cars, so he takes a different street to Avenida Colón, planning to find Calvo on the arterial.

The traffic lights are with him, and he has Calvo in sight again within a couple of miles. 

Will keeps a loose tail this time, dropping back sometimes and letting Calvo out of sight entirely, before reeling him back in a few minutes later just to check he’s still there. He always is. 

He falls back further when they head out of Carlos Paz, sticking to the same speed Calvo keeps on the road into the Sierras, and only rarely glimpsing him on the longer straights between the bends. He accelerates some as they near the last junction, gaining ground and making sure Calvo’s in sight when it matters. 

Will watches him turn onto that same uphill road, and he lets him go and continues straight on along the highway, just like last time. He pulls over once the turning’s out of sight behind him, switches on his phone and calls Hannibal. 

The ringing cuts out when the phone is answered. “Now,” Will says into the silence, and then he hangs up, removing the battery from the back before he drives on. He finds the place a few miles along the road where he can turn the car around to make his way back, and this time he makes the left and starts to climb. 

The road winds gradually, parallel to the course of the stream, with riparian trees on one side and small agricultural fields on the other. He finds the grey Toyota pulled over by the gated entrance to a pasture, in front of Hannibal’s borrowed SUV, and Will draws up alongside. Hannibal’s waiting in the driver’s seat with his window down, and Calvo thoroughly trussed up with zip ties and silenced by duct tape in the back. He’s still a little glassy around the eyes, but the fentanyl Hannibal dosed him with is short-acting and he’s close enough to awake.

Hannibal’s as immaculate as ever, and even Calvo doesn’t look too disrupted, considering his circumstances, but Will lowers his own window and checks anyway. “Any trouble?”

Hannibal’s lips twitch upwards at the corner. “It went exactly as we planned.” 

It would. Nobody suspects the car in front of them of being a plant, and Hannibal was driving slowly, a stranger who doesn’t know the road, Calvo familiar with every twist and turn and taking it much faster. Hannibal could arrange to ‘accidentally’ brush the two cars together, and when they stopped to check the damage and exchange details, Hannibal was poised to do what he does so very well.

Hannibal’s expression now is pleasantly self-satisfied, but Will can look further into his eyes and find the predator there that isn’t satisfied at all. Not yet. Will sucks in a slow breath and recognises the tingle within, his own matching beast stirring and stretching from sleep. And Hannibal stares back and sees its movements too, his smile creeping wider.

Will lingers in their mutual awareness a moment longer before he sets his gaze back on the road and pulls away, Hannibal following in the SUV. He finds a place to stop under the trees near the stream about a mile along, and locks up the Hilux. Nobody seeing it there will link it to Calvo’s empty Toyota; they’ll just assume someone’s out fishing or hiking.

Will jumps into the SUV’s passenger seat and reaches up to adjust the rear view mirror, giving himself a good angle on Calvo, and Hannibal resumes the climb away from the highway.

They come to the first turn another mile up the road, the main route forking up to the left and a lesser road angled off to the right. Hannibal stops at the junction, and Will watches as Calvo’s face twitches, his eyes flicking up the hill. 

“Left,” Will tells him, and Hannibal drives on, Calvo’s eyes narrowing slightly. 

They negotiate the second junction smoothly enough, but by the third, Calvo’s catching on, staring resolutely at his own lap. Will picks the bigger fork, purely on the statistical probabilities, but Calvo’s poker face slips into an edge of arrogance within a half a mile. “This is wrong, take the other,” Will tells Hannibal, and anger tightens the muscles in Calvo’s cheek. 

They’re definitely getting closer.

There’s only one more junction to navigate, and then they’re driving a road with badly cracked and rutted dirt and half overgrown, and there’s no question in his head that this will be the place. They pass signs saying private, and no entry, and later one declaring danger, and eventually they pull into what was once a large open area, now half overgrown by bushes and small trees encroaching from the edge closest to the stream.

There are enough buildings left for it to be immediately recognisable as an old mining site, and Will berates himself for not figuring it out sooner. The Sierras are littered with the detritus of over four centuries of digging for minerals, everything from the half-collapsed leaking crawl-ways of Jesuit times to the giant scar of the uranium quarry-pit that closed in the nineties. Calvo did some supplemental filming for an independent documentary on the industrial history of the area; it was linked from the internet searches Will ran. Calvo will have found this place while he was out shooting video, and Will could have been smarter piecing it together. Would have been, if he’d had more than three days to chase down every trail Calvo left dangling behind him.

Will pulls his eyes away from the mirror and scans around the area, concentrating on the details, the distraction allowing him to start erasing Calvo from his head. He doesn’t need him there any more. Hannibal stays in his seat too – Will hasn’t seen anything to suggest an accomplice, and Calvo had no reason to think anyone would come here, but they give the clearing more than a once over to be safe.

It’s quiet but for the breeze in the leaves, and the passing buzz of insects, and they look at one another and then both get out, Will reaching for the small bag in the footwell before he closes the door, the thunk loud in the noon mountain air. The car locks with a flash of lights beside him, sealing Calvo inside.

There are several buildings nearby, most in varying states of disrepair, left rotting for decades. Except for one, a smaller structure off to the side that might once have been an office; its windows are boarded up with wood that looks newer, no decaying gaps between the planks. When they walk closer, there’s a gleaming modern bolt on the outside of the door.

They don’t hear anything from the inside. They don’t expect to. Abril won’t be calling out for help because she heard a car arrive, not after two weeks. The only person who comes is her captor.

They pull on their ski masks, and Will reaches for the bolt with gloved fingers. The door opens smoothly and quietly, because it’s been oiled, and a rectangle of daylight spreads across the dim interior. 

Abril Arias is a small unmoving blob hunched against the back wall, half buried in a curtain of long hair that falls forward across her face and knees. Will doesn’t need to see her eyes to feel her terror; it screams at him from every inch of her body, her posture, her tremors, abject misery and crushing fear radiating across the space. As his vision adjusts, he takes in more of the inside, the two large buckets in opposite corners – one must hold water, the other’s for her waste.

Even to Will, the stench is appalling; he can’t imagine the effect it will be having on Hannibal.

With the thought of him, Will’s attention moves to him, and he’s abruptly aware that Hannibal has locked completely rigid alongside him, frozen in the doorway and holding in a single breath, staring at Abril.

Oh, fuck. _Mischa._

The resemblance can’t be physical, Abril too dark of skin and hair to pass for Hannibal’s blood sister, but there’s something in the circumstances here that’s close.

Will’s eyes flick from Hannibal to Abril, and back, before he closes them and takes a long, deliberate inhale, pressing back the suffocating twin assaults from his head.

Will wraps a hand around Hannibal’s arm and steers him from the doorway so he’s fully outside, and leaning against the wall alongside it. Hannibal moves with him, and he’s breathing again, but his eyes are still seeing something very different, because he’s standing at the edge of one of the holes in the floor of his mind, staring down at whatever lies in the blackness of the pit.

Will’s close against him, and he slides his hand down to Hannibal’s fingers and tightens his own around them, pressure gentle and steady. Hannibal actually looks at him then, and he opens his mouth like he’s going to say something before he remembers. Instead he squeezes back, and for the moment that will have to do.

Will turns again to the doorway, and the ball of fierce emotion curled inside.

It was a subject of some discussion, but Will’s very relieved now that he decided on himself for this part. Hannibal has the psychiatric training, but he had no interest in child psychology because kids are far too easy to predict and manipulate, completely lacking in challenge, and he doesn’t actually give a damn about Abril on any level. Will has his empathy to figure his way through this, and he doesn’t intrinsically _loom_ the way Hannibal’s bigger build and bearing do. 

Will never had much to do with kids before he met Molly – he was an only child, no nephews or nieces, moving on too often to see the cousins, no circle of close friends breeding around him. He had to learn fast with Walter, but Walter was a pretty together kid with a down to earth mom – he liked dogs and fishing, which gave them a connection, and it was Molly he turned to when he was upset; Will was definitely the second choice of port in a storm. He has no starting point for dealing with a terrified, traumatised ten year old, and he must look scary as hell to her with his ski mask on, but that’s not optional.

He crouches down beside the door to make himself smaller, less threatening, like he would with a fearful stray. He reaches into his pocket, slowly, carefully, no sudden movements – it’s all the same principles, really – and he pulls out the phone to play the first mp3. Will recorded them all from female voices this time, bright and cheerful.

“Hi, Abril. Don’t be scared. We came to help you. We’re here to make sure he doesn’t hurt you, or anyone else ever again, okay?”

Those huge eyes are still glued to her lap, and mostly hidden behind the tangled fall of her hair. She doesn’t move or respond, or indicate that she even heard.

Will doesn’t need empathy to understand the freeze reaction. He moves on to the next recording, short and to the point. “We brought you some food.” _That_ gets him a lift of her head, and some brief eye contact. It really is just like handling the dogs; the basic survival priorities of any species are the same. He holds out his arm to show her the Thermos from the bag, and opens it to pour some of the contents into a cup. Her eyes fixate on it as the unmistakeable odour of soup fills the building. He swallows a sip from it himself, before shuffling far enough across the floor so he can set it down just a few feet from her when he’s at full stretch, and then he retreats back to the doorway.

It takes almost a minute, but eventually she uncurls to hands and knees and reaches for it. Her small fingers struggle slightly to grip it, but she gets it close to her face, and she sniffs at the contents suspiciously. 

The soup inside it is basic, with none of Hannibal’s more esoteric ingredients that might be traced, and it’s definitely made from chicken.

“Slowly,” Will plays the recording, “Don’t drink too fast, take it slowly,” because the soup had to be cool enough that it wouldn’t deactivate the drug, and they don’t want her gulping it down and then vomiting it all back up again.

She doesn’t trust him, never takes her eyes from him over the rim of the cup, but she’s too starved to resist drinking. She takes the first sip carefully, tasting it in her mouth before she swallows it, deliberate and thoughtful. He stays where he is, still, and the next gulp she takes is bigger.

After the third mouthful, she breaks and swallows the lot, tipping her head back to drain every last drop. Her enormous eyes come back to him instantly, and she holds the cup out towards him, hope lurking now beneath the ever-present fear.

He shakes his head, slow and obvious, and plays another recording. “You have to wait for more food, sorry. Too much could make you sick.”

She lowers the cup, hunching back down with her head dipped and her eyes watching once again from behind that sweep of ratty hair. There’s obvious disappointment in her, but no surprise. She’s sunk fully into the mindset where anything that seems good for even a moment can’t really be true.

He looks down to the phone and searches through the list again. “I’ll have to leave soon and tell people we found you. I’ll make a fire so everyone knows where you are. It will take a little while for them to get here, but you’re safe now and they’ll come for you and look after you and take you home to your family.”

It’s not the whole truth, but it’s close enough that Will won’t feel guilty for lying to her. She still doesn’t respond, but he’s not really expecting her to, and he wouldn’t know what the hell to do if she did, because he’s not set up to hold an actual conversation here.

He presses next. “I’ll stay with you a bit longer before I go, okay?”

There’s no positive feedback to indicate she actually wants him there, but there’s nothing immediately negative either, and her fear’s downgraded from when he first walked in. It’s not gone – she probably won’t stop being scared for weeks, if not months – but it’s not frantically spearing at Will. It’s more of an ache pressing through him.

Hannibal’s moved to stand behind him again, at the edge of the doorway, and Will reaches back to wrap his arm around his leg, his fingers gripping his calf. The muscle there’s not tight and defensive any more, just the soft, static tension of weight-bearing, and Will leans a little, sinking closer into touch.

Hannibal’s not broadcasting anything but his presence right now, and Will finds the same relief in that that he always did, from the earliest days, appreciating the emotional quiet of his company with no idea of what lay behind it, Hannibal becoming the still, unrippled pool at the centre of a woodland glade in Will’s head.

He’s expecting to feel Hannibal’s hand in his hair, on his face, because their touching is usually mutual, but he doesn’t, and it’s okay at this moment, because Will only needs him to stay. He sits, watching Abril, monitoring her and maintaining the gateway out of her via the steady physical contact. It’s not so long before she’s trembling through her legs and lowering herself to lie on the floor with her back to the wall as the drug kicks in.

It’s a medium dose anxiolytic, calculated to allow for a child already weak from hunger. She’s sedated, not unconscious, but they can approach her now without triggering terror, without her screaming and kicking. 

Actual medical expertise becomes the priority at this point, and Hannibal frees himself from Will’s clinging fingers, walking past him into the shadowed interior. He wraps a blanket from the car around her before he checks her eyes and pulse, looks her over a little closer for any obvious injury, then sweeps her up and carries her from the building.

Moving her wasn’t an intrinsic part of the plan.

Hannibal’s mouth is inelastic beneath the ski mask as he walks past Will, Abril murmuring dazedly against his shoulder, his gaze fixed across the clearing on one of the furthest buildings. Will scrambles to his feet after him, and he’s lived this with man for six months and understood his thoughts for years, and even beneath the head to toe clothing he should be able to read something from his body language, but all he feels is a void.

Will walks alongside him, close, his arm brushing Hannibal’s elbow where it bends around Abril, and for the first time in nearly a year he’s uncertain of anything Hannibal might do. For a moment, she reminded him of Mischa, but then so did Abigail, and Hannibal could disassociate himself from that connection far enough to slit her throat and discard her on his kitchen floor like a filthy dishrag.

Will’s shut on the outside of Hannibal’s castellated walls again, and it’s disconcerting and fundamentally _wrong._

He won’t be staying outside, but he’s not going to do anything yet, not while Hannibal’s holding Abril and Will has no idea what’s happening in his head.

Hannibal takes her to the bigger building still standing, already being part swallowed by the encroaching bushes. The roof has gone, only the walls intact, so it’s easy to see what’s here, and he sets her on the floor close by a rusting hulk of metal with huge wheels and pulleys that Will’s brain automatically catalogues as a likely engine for an ore processing belt. Hannibal lays Abril half on the blanket, and she’s wriggling and muttering with her eyes big and glassy, but she settles when he tucks the rest of the blanket around her. Will admits it’s an improvement over her prison – this space at least has daylight, and it doesn’t stink.

Hannibal takes a bunch of zip ties from his pocket and starts to daisy chain them, eventually hooking one end to a pulley wheel and the other to Abril’s ankle. She doesn’t need to see what’s going to happen, and they don’t want her fleeing across the hillsides and getting genuinely lost. On the scale of the last two weeks, tying her in place now while she’s drugged and quiet isn’t adding a whole lot to her trauma. Will sets a travel mug of water by her, in case she stirs enough to want it before she’s found.

Hannibal stands, looking down at her, and makes no move to step away. 

Will takes his arm and gently tugs him around, and Hannibal’s head comes up, his gaze almost as vacant as hers. Will wants to _say_ things, but they can’t talk in front of Abril – she’s drugged, but they have no idea how much she might remember. He peels off one glove with his teeth and reaches up to brush his fingers lightly over Hannibal’s lips, where he’s exposed without fabric, where he can actually touch him; his lips part as Will’s fingertip drags past the lower one, and Hannibal’s there with him, with emotion in his eyes, seeing Will and loving him, and Will figures he really shouldn’t be surprised by the ease of it.

Hannibal was shoved into the past, forced into an old room with rotten floorboards, but he learned how to seal that door behind him decades ago, and he’s back in himself and controlled within a minute when he’s not looking directly at the stimulus any more. Sometimes Will really fucking envies him the ability to do that.

Will still has his hold on his arm and he tugs towards the doorway now, out of the building, and Hannibal nods and moves with him, blinking as they emerge again into the full midday sun. 

With Abril safe and secured, they can head back to the car, and the other part of today’s business still waiting there.

They peel off the ski masks as they walk, and Will’s been sweating beneath it, the mountain breeze cooling now as it whispers freely over his cheeks. His stomach twists tight and his mouth is dry, and while his heart rate’s measured and steady, he can feel his own pulse thumping heavy through his wrists.

He’s never known this shocking purity of anticipation, wild and chafing beneath his skin. Not when he was standing in a subtly lit room, eyes locked with Hannibal’s as they waited for the Dragon, because he didn’t truly know then what was coming. Not when he walked the length of the driveway and rang the doorbell at the house, knowing _exactly_ what was coming, finally letting himself take and have everything he’d been denying for years, because there was still that prickling undercurrent of what might happen if they didn’t stabilise.

Will has full understanding now, and no reservations.

Beside him, Hannibal appears completely impassive. He strides across the uneven earth with purpose, but the muscles of his shoulders and arms are relaxed, his breathing barely noticeable. There’s only a faint hint of dampness in the hair at the nape of his neck, and he has the neutral expression of a mildly bored man selecting bananas from a supermarket display, but Hannibal’s still palpably present. There’s no resemblance to the immense barriers he threw up in Abril’s vicinity, only the Ripper’s clinical detachment from anything outside of one particular moment.

Will fixes his eyes on the SUV, and lengthens his steps.

He peels off his gloves when Hannibal unlocks the car, tucking them into the door pocket and reaching for the knife sheathed there. Gloves are impersonal, and unwanted.

Will’s anticipating the feel of the blood, seeing it trail red over his skin instead of black.

As he moves to open the rear door, Hannibal stops him with a hand on his arm, and when Will turns, Hannibal’s holding out a different weapon, offering Will the handle while his eyes reflect in the blade. 

“I thought you might prefer this,” Hannibal says.

Will knows it from Sosa’s descriptions of the bodies – a seven and a half inch blade, non-serrated, a little under two inches wide at the hilt. This is the knife Calvo used to kill children, and Will’s eyes fix on it as he takes it, feels the shape of the handle and the weight of it as it settles into his palm. 

It seems fitting that Will should use it to kill Calvo.

“Good idea,” he says, and he feels his own thin-lipped smile slink across his face to match Hannibal’s, a lion patrolling barely visible at the edge of the long grass.

He throws the door fully open, unsurprised to find Calvo sprawled out on the floor now between the seats; tied as he is, he’s not been able to reach the child lock deactivator by the driver, but he gave it a go. Will pulls his bound form from the SUV, dragging him through the dirt to dump him face down some twenty feet away, distant from anything that could conceivably be used as a weapon. Calvo twists his head around and glares up at him, frustrated and mutinous, but he doesn’t bother wriggling against the ties. He already did that while they were busy with Abril, his wrists angry and abraded at the small of his back, and he knows it’s useless. 

The drug’s long gone from his system now, his eyes sharp and attentive, the pupils dilated by adrenaline, not chemicals. 

Will kneels on Calvo’s thighs while he cuts the ties from around his legs, shifting his weight higher onto his back when he starts on his arms. He slices only part way through the final zip-tie and springs back to stand a few feet away, out of immediate reach.

Calvo snaps the last strand of plastic, flexing out his wrists and fingers before he sets his hands to the earth. He pushes up onto his feet slowly, making no sudden moves that might reflect as threat while he’s so badly disadvantaged. He backs off a few steps, his attention flicking between them, and he reaches up to rip the duct tape from his face with a wince he can’t entirely hide. He still doesn’t speak, visibly confused at being freed, assessing them both and reconsidering his outcomes.

Will tilts his head and tells him flatly, “You should run.”

For a few seconds, Calvo stands, eyes moving back and forth between them, and there’s a moment when Will thinks he won’t, his muscles taut and tingling and ready for the attack.

Calvo’s a predator, but he’s a smart one, and Will has his knife, and he’s already experienced how effective Hannibal can be without one. Will sees the decision in his eyes, a half second before he wheels away, springing into flight.

Will’s already grinning when Calvo turns, and he leaps after him.

Calvo makes for the car first, the obvious barrier to put between them, and Will hears Hannibal’s steps veer away to circle round the other side. Calvo recognises the trap and instantly jinks back, heading for the bushes instead, and Will gains a vital couple of feet on him. 

They’re pretty evenly matched on pace; Calvo’s a few years younger, with an even stronger kick to his motivation right now, but his job’s not physical and he doesn’t run with a pack of dogs every day. Will’s pulse is up, pounding fast and forceful, he’s breathing open-mouthed and raw, and he’s aware of every push and strain of his muscles as he works to keep up with him, to _catch_ him. His eyes are locked on his target only a few feet ahead, his peripheral vision enough to keep track of the uneven footing, and always aware of Hannibal in the longer strides he hears thudding over the hard-packed dirt off to his left.

Calvo’s almost at the line of undergrowth, close, so close now, but he has to slow to look, to find the thinner patch of bushes to offer him a path, and Will has him, he _has_ him. He stretches to his fullest extent and plunges the knife deep into Calvo’s back below his ribs, where the tissue is soft and unobstructed. Calvo grunts as it sinks in, half way to the hilt, then shrieks when Will’s weight drags it downwards, the cut slicing shallower and the knife slipping free as Calvo runs and stumbles away from the blade. 

Calvo’s dropping down, his footing gone with the shock and pain, and Will’s falling too, caught in his own momentum from that lunging attack, gripping the handle tight with the blade outside the line of his body when he hits the ground. They’re both flat in the dirt, Calvo stopped short up against the bushes, and then they’re both scrambling upright, their eyes fixed on one another and only feet apart. 

Calvo’s stripped raw by the pain and adrenaline, all the fear in him exposed, the suspicion now transforming into knowledge, that he’s going to die here. And beneath that fear is the anger, the anger that’s going to fight every inch of the way, and Will’s exultant when he sees, because he _wants_ to fight, even more than he wants to chase.

Will reads all of it in a second, and he only has a second, because Calvo knows he can’t turn and run with Will so close and holding a weapon, he knows he’ll start to weaken the longer he bleeds, and he lunges at Will without even a pause to fully regain his balance, grabbing for his right arm, for the knife. Will’s been here with Hannibal, for hours and days, and it’s so obvious and easy to avoid, twisting and ducking beneath it to slice the blade along Calvo’s ribs, feeling it catch and drag shallow over the bones. Calvo’s fingers hook into the back of Will’s shirt, trying to hold him close so he can’t get any swing behind the knife, and Will drops and rolls to pull loose. As he does, he’s vitally aware of what Calvo’s too focussed on Will to think about, aware of Hannibal moving in behind Calvo and slashing through the muscles of his upper arm with his own weapon, the cut dramatic, and nowhere near any of those arteries they talked about. 

Hannibal isn’t killing. He’s playing.

Will rolls right back onto his feet, and Calvo hesitates, looking between them, hunted and cornered; Hannibal’s standing a little way back from him now with his head at a slight angle, looking a question at Will. And Will answers with a nod, because this isn’t his kill, this is theirs, for them to share.

They both turn their eyes fierce on Calvo, and they both attack. 

There’s no hurry to it. Calvo’s no threat. He’s unarmed, and it’s clear he’s never trained to fight; he’s outnumbered, when either one of them would have killed him alone. Calvo tries, but he can’t defend on two sides at once, and it rapidly becomes a game, one of them circling round to distract and maybe graze an edge along his skin in the finest line of slow-rising red, while the other takes advantage, pushing in to inflict a deeper slice.

Calvo’s weakening within minutes, his movements slowing, his T-shirt tattered with cuts and growing ever more soaked with his own blood, where it accumulates to drip thick and half-clotted from the dangling edges of the cloth. It’s no longer a game when he can’t defend any more; it’s only the deliberate infliction of damage and pain, a fitting retribution for everything he did to others, and delivering it is savagely joyous.

As Calvo finally staggers and sinks to his knees, their gazes fix together above him, both of them breathing through parted lips. Hannibal’s clothes are splattered in layers of criss-crossing red streaks and drips, his hair dishevelled with strands shifting in the play of the breeze, and Will smiles when he sees him step in behind their kill.

Hannibal seizes Calvo’s head, exposing his throat, and Will slits him deep to the bone, slicing through veins, arteries, muscle, windpipe, _everything_. The blood arcs and sprays in pulses, warm and thick over Will’s hands and his clothes, higher to splash across the exposed skin of his cheek. There’s more of it flowing sticky like lava all down the front of Calvo’s T-shirt as the veins drain out, and Will’s eyes raise to Hannibal’s, to find him there.

He’s there, because he’s always there, he will always be there, and Will’s awash in a flood of so many disparate emotions he can’t begin to prioritise them to decide _what_ he’s feeling. 

He knows none of it’s unwanted, and all of it’s hungry and _soaring._

The body hangs oddly in Hannibal’s grip now, slumped at an impossible angle beneath his hold on the head, the neck sagging twisted with so little tissue left intact to support the spine. Hannibal loosens his fingers, the corpse flopping face down into the dirt at his feet, and he straightens to full height, his attention still locked on Will. 

Will’s aware through the maelstrom in his head that his cock’s fully hard and trapped against his hip by his clothes; he’s burning to push Hannibal down into the grass and fuck him right there, alongside the cooling, clotting streaks of blood stretching away among the scattered leaves.

He’d never do it – it would be utter madness to spend longer than needed here, to spread more DNA all over a murder site – but the intensity of his desire flares so vividly bright that he can feel it happen, he can live the act in his head, and its intrusion into this moment is startling.

Killing isn’t sexual for Will. It’s not some bizarre paraphilia. The ‘sprig of zest’ that Hannibal had so carefully understated when they talked about Will shooting Hobbs, it isn’t connected to his cock. It’s connected to his mind, to his sense of righteousness and justice, to what these indiscriminate killers _deserve_ for their crimes, and to Will having the power and skill to deal it to them.

The killing has never been sexual, but Hannibal is. He’s intimately wound through Will’s brain and his body, desires and responses finely tuned to Hannibal’s through innate attraction and learning and mutually pleasurable conditioning, and it’s Hannibal’s presence that has introduced the sexual element now. It pours from his eyes, it lived in Hannibal’s stare fixed on Will when he killed, the unfettered adoration, admiration, love and lust and pride blazing alongside the final ooze of blood as their target became a corpse, and Will returns every emotion, every inch of the impossible depths of it, absorbing and reflecting and broadcasting. 

He supposes it shouldn’t be surprising that the intensity of their mutual craving has manifested in his body. It hadn’t happened that way with Dolarhyde, but blood loss from multiple stab wounds would certainly lower the chances of achieving an erection.

He steps forward and presses a kiss into Hannibal, brief but fervent, a few seconds of open lips and future promise all they can allow. Will pulls back enough to meet his eyes, and he’s past being astonished by how much he feels. “Thank you,” he says, “for all of it,” and then he turns and grips the body by the ankles. 

Hannibal stares after him for just a moment before he bends to grab the arms.

Conversation from there is entirely practical as they attend to the necessities, sparse exchanges of clipped phrases and quiet words because Abril isn’t all that far away. They carry the limp sprawl of limbs that used to be Calvo to the building he was using as a prison – it feels right to leave him where he killed his victims – and place him face down. The stench in there is still unpleasant, but it’s no worse than the reek of blood and leaking bowels coming from the fresh cadaver, and it occurs to Will belatedly that Hannibal’s exquisitely sensitive nose must be well acclimated to the exudates of corpses.

Hannibal slices open the back of the T-shirt, then peels away the thin layers of superficial musculature to quickly and skilfully dissect out a section of the deeper muscle from alongside the spine. He wraps it carefully, and takes it to the cooler waiting in the car.

The killing was savage. Everything internal to the body is damaged, contaminated. They could still remove the brain intact if they wanted, but it isn’t important. They only need one piece from Will’s seminal murder for them to share. And Will acknowledges this as his first pure act of murder. Dolarhyde was certainly _planned_ , but he attacked Will, and defence was a valid element. This time, he had no justification for killing. He didn’t need one.

There’s no attempt to produce art from the remains – this was Will’s design, not Hannibal’s, and this murderer of children doesn’t deserve to be embellished. He deserves to be seen as exactly what he was, and there’s no beauty here. The only beauty lay in his dying, and that was uniquely _theirs_ , and private. 

After Hannibal harvests the meat, they work to split and peel the body, tearing thick strips of skin away from the flesh beneath. They bring cans of gasoline from the car and thoroughly soak the corpse. They leave the door open and pry a few boards off the window to encourage a throughflow of air. Then they clean each other of the obvious blood on their exposed skin and change into fresh clothes, adding the contaminated ones to the pile before they set light to everything.

Will tosses the plastic cup he and Abril drank from into the blaze, along with the phones they’ve been using, and finally he throws the knife in too. He doesn’t need a souvenir, and keeping them is stupidly dangerous. The blade won’t burn, and it will be physical evidence to back up Abril’s testimony.

The fire will destroy any DNA they left in the form of hairs or skin, and the smoke will attract attention and the authorities, who will find Abril. By skinning the body and exposing the fat layers as fuel, their victim will burn hotter, faster, charring down to bone in only a couple of hours. By the time the fire department get all the way out here and douse the building, it’s unlikely enough of the soft tissue will be left for anyone to realise a slice of him was already missing.

Will’s not worried about sterilising the actual murder site. It will be hours before a forensics team start work, and the wind’s not going to leave any stray hairs in place that long.

With the blaze taking hold and black smoke coiling through the air above the trees, they jump into the SUV and head back down the road. Hannibal pauses close to where they left the Hilux, just long enough for Will to hop out and close the door, and then he continues on towards the highway.

Will pulls his gloves on to open the pickup, and waits a few minutes before he drives after Hannibal. They don’t want anyone seeing the two cars travelling close together and making a mental association. 

They meet up again in the pre-arranged spot a little ways outside Tanti. This road really is more of a goat track, but it leads to a creek in a hollow not far from the highway, and they’re obscured from view by the bushes that flourish near the water.

They transfer the cooler from Hannibal’s SUV, then take the rest of the gasoline and saturate the whole interior and set it alight.

Abril saw that car when Hannibal carried her by it, and there’ll be a paint match to the damage on Calvo’s Toyota. Most stolen vehicles only get fingerprinted because of budget and time constraints, but this one’s linked to a murder and would get the full forensic work up with DNA testing of every stray hair. There can’t be anything left to analyse.

They leave barely ten minutes after Will arrived in the Hilux. Fifteen after that, they’ve ditched the pickup and they’re back in their own vehicle and headed for home.

The physical labour and the passage of time has been more than enough for Will’s erection to subside, but not the swirling, dancing buzz of joy and triumph and desire in his head. Hannibal’s half watching the road as he drives and half watching Will, studying him with interest and a certain amount of care. Will feels the intensity of that gaze on him, every time his eyes shift sideways, and there’s lust circling around its edges, yes, but that’s not the heart of it, not now. 

Will leans back against the headrest, silent, waiting, because Hannibal isn’t the only one inclined to watch, and study and learn.

He lets his eyes drift between Hannibal and the mirrors, keeping check on the road behind, and he casts his mind back over the day again. He’s running through all of it, thinking of how he’d look at the evidence and the crime scene, reviewing if there’s anything they could have missed. He doesn’t find anything now that he didn’t take into consideration before. 

Abril will give a description that matches the men who invaded Doctor Sosa’s home and interrogated him using recordings, and that won’t surprise anyone, given the questions they asked that night. The cops will be annoyed that someone tracked down Calvo before they did, but nobody will be shocked that a couple of vigilantes killed a serial murderer of children instead of calling in the law.

The police won’t even feel like looking too hard, in case it turns out to be one of their neighbours, or one of the grieving relatives they’ve been shepherding for months. Officially there’ll be a pair of wanted murderers to hunt for, but incentive within the cops on the street will be low.

Will doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as a perfect murder, but he planned it to be close.

There’s nothing to disturb him on the road behind them, and Hannibal’s only being Hannibal, keeping check on Will with a gentle curiosity that he doesn’t object to. It fits with his mood somehow. His head remains a deep whirlpool of endlessly rolling emotions that he can skirt around by concentrating on something outside it, but holding a conversation would be bizarrely intrusive.

They pull up under the carport and open the door, and the clock’s chiming over one quick bark and the skittering of claws on linoleum as the dogs gather panting around their legs. 

So much has happened today – it feels objectively impossible that it’s still only mid-afternoon. 

Will reaches down to pet and speak nonsense to them, and then Hannibal’s arm settles on his waist, steering him gently towards the nearest chair. “Wait here for a moment, I’ll see to the dogs.” 

The pack follow Hannibal happily enough when he whistles them to the back door and releases them into the yard. They’ve been shut up indoors most of the day, and they hurtle outside in a flurry of limbs and a couple of enthusiastic yips from Sarah that make Will smile.

Hannibal doesn’t come back immediately – there are noises from the kitchen, cupboard doors closing and the fridge, and the clink of glass on granite, and Will finds himself wishing the dogs had stayed with him while he studies the floor and listens to the clock tick.

Hannibal’s shoes tap closer, sharp and distinctive on the tile, and he’s offering him a tall glass of some kind of fruit juice, chilled but not iced.

He is thirsty, when he thinks about it, and his throat’s dry with the lingering bite of smoke. He takes the glass and drinks it, one big gulp and swallow at a time, finishing it in less than a minute.

“Thanks,” he says, because he’s not really considering the obvious, boring necessities, and it’s good that Hannibal is. 

Hannibal takes the empty glass from him with a smile. “Come with me, Will.” 

Hannibal leads him upstairs to their bathroom and strips them both naked, taking him by the hand as they step into the shower. Will’s more than capable of undressing himself, but he’s enjoying the flow of Hannibal’s touch and attention, and he sees no reason to stop him.

Hannibal squeezes a blob of shower gel into his palm, and spreads it over Will’s neck and shoulder. “Let yourself relax, Will. You’ll need to. Your mind will take time to process so many inputs.” His hands massage the suds into Will’s muscles, and relaxing is easy, because it feels amazing. 

“My mind isn’t thinking about anything,” Will says, and it’s more or less the truth. He leans back against the steamy tiles, and sighs in appreciation of the fingers working deeply above his collar bone.

“Yes, just like that,” Hannibal says, and Will’s eyes are closed, but he hears the smile in the words. 

They wash themselves, or each other, really it’s more each other, soaping every inch of skin until cocobolo wood oil overwhelms the stink of accelerant and smoke. They work shampoo carefully through blood-spattered hair with gentle fingers, and Hannibal takes Will’s hands and scrapes delicately beneath each of his nails with a very fine pick, before moving on to his own. 

If Hannibal’s caught, it won’t matter how many more murders he’s wearing evidence of, but he remains obstinately fastidious, because it’s his nature. It matters for Will, because if Hannibal’s ever returned to a cell, it’s vital that Will isn’t. 

“Let me,” Hannibal says softly, and Hannibal’s hands cup his cheeks, his thumbs brushing his eyelids closed before he tilts Will’s head back into the spray to rinse the shampoo from his curls, fingers rubbing slow over his scalp. 

Hannibal’s treating him with a care and delicacy, both physical and emotional, that sweeps Will inevitably back to the night he killed Randall Tier. _The water’s warm on his bruised knuckles, the alcohol stings clarity into the gaps in his broken skin, and Hannibal’s voice and words and eyes and touch combine in a gentle concern sharper than the bite of antiseptic and more terrifying than his violence._

Living it again now, absent the distortions and torment of his own brutalised self-image, it’s startlingly sweet, as oddly as that word sits on Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal’s hands slow their work on Will’s scalp, and Will can almost hear him silently assessing. “Don’t think at this point, Will,” he advises. “Don’t analyse. The time for that will come later. For now, you must allow yourself to feel, and respond to those feelings.”

“I’m responding just fine,” Will quips, inching out of the spray and opening his eyes with a smile. He’s responding to Hannibal’s touch, to his soft, accented words, and his wet, naked nearness. His hard on isn’t quite back to the degree of right after the killing, but he’s getting there.

Hannibal isn’t, yet. He’s not uninterested, his cock hanging fuller than its resting state, but his focus is narrowed to the mental and emotional side of Will, and his single-minded commitment has always been formidable.

Will twines his soapy fingers with Hannibal’s, curling to stroke over the webbing between each one. “I thought I’d flash back to Dolarhyde when we killed him,” he says. “I was surprised afterwards to find I’d stayed in the present.”

Hannibal tilts his head, regarding him with quiet scrutiny. “Your mind was too bound into the moment to wander. Some actions demand unqualified attention.”

“Murder has an intensity wholly unrivalled,” Will muses, almost curious. He’s never been able to consider it objectively before.

“Yes.” Hannibal instills that single word with total certainty. He separates one hand from Will’s, moving it to rest on Will’s hip. “Killing, and the responses to it, are deeply personal, Will. I’m prepared to guide you, if you feel the need, if you ask for it, but I don’t wish to interfere with your development.”

Will almost laughs at that, and there’s a trace of bitterness lingering when he speaks. “That would be a first.” 

Hannibal lifts his hand to Will’s face, brushing his knuckles light along his cheek. “I’ve pushed you in the past, when it was clear you would refuse to allow your uniqueness to flourish without some influence,” he acknowledges, “but you’ve moved beyond that now.”

Will doesn’t say anything, because he has, and it’s a fact with no emotional consequences. He didn’t kill Calvo for Abril, though saving her was a very satisfying side effect. He killed Calvo for himself, because he wanted to do it, because killing lets him experience sensations he can never reach in any other way.

“You were entirely perfect today, Will, and wholly of your own volition, planning and enacting all of your own desires.” Hannibal leans closer, pressing his lips briefly to Will’s cheek, and his voice is a whisper barely heard above the spray of the water. “You are everything I ever dared to believe you might become.”

Hannibal might be the most genuine person Will can imagine – once he’s decided to be honest he holds _nothing_ back. Will withdraws just enough to fix their eyes together, staring into expansive twin brown depths either side of a blurry nose. “You want what you see,” he teases.

“I always want anything of exceptional beauty,” Hannibal agrees. He sinks down onto his knees, reaching for Will’s cock, and Will pushes him back, and tugs at his chin until their eyes meet. “I’m going to fuck you now,” he tells him.

Hannibal tilts his head, blinking slow and lazy. “Make it worth my while,” he says.

Will grins at him, with toothy intent. “Don’t I always?” 

“I concede you apply admirable effort,” Hannibal says, and Will grips him at his bicep and pulls him to his feet and out of the shower. He tows him from the bathroom and backs him down onto the bed, still dripping with hair plastered across his forehead.

Will crawls over him, aligning their bodies and settling his weight, the hair on Hannibal’s chest brushing against his nipples, their cocks side by side in the damp heat between them. Will flexes his hips, once, twice, slowly, enough to feel the friction as they rub and press against one another. Sometimes he likes to come this way; it reminds him of that first afternoon, when they were both so desperate for this, clinging to one another too completely both physically and mentally to think of anything beyond it.

Nostalgia isn’t his primary motivator right now.

He sits half way upright, taking both of Hannibal’s wrists and pressing them to the pillows, stretched above his head. Hannibal lies boneless and smiling, his cock the only part of him hard, and he lets Will do exactly what he likes. “Does it feel good, to hold me down, to control me?”

Will shakes his head, because it does, he’s feeling fantastic in more ways right now than he can begin to count, but that’s not why. “You feel good. Always.” With Hannibal, he can take control or give it over into his hands, and there’s no distinction, only the flow of mood and moments back and forth between them. He’s still holding Hannibal’s wrists, and he leans in to suck on the lobe of one ear. Hannibal turns his head to make it easier, and Will drags the sharp edge of his incisors over the soft skin instead. “Does it feel good to let me?”

“I’ve been encouraging you to react by instinct today, to respond to your nature,” Hannibal says. “This is what you’re feeling now, and I’m amply disposed to accommodate you.”

Will grins down at him, because he wasn’t expecting an open admission, and he doesn’t need one. “I think I can make you be very accommodating.”

Hannibal stares up at Will, serious and unhesitating. “Yes, you can,” he says, and everything below Will’s diaphragm flips and drops away into fire.

Hannibal suggested a few days ago that Will would let him do anything, and Will immediately denied it. The truth is more complicated than that. The list of things Will wouldn’t let Hannibal do is significant, but the list of things he wouldn’t forgive Hannibal for if he did them anyway barely exists at all.

With Hannibal, it’s different. He looks up at Will now in unending devotion, waiting, and he really would let Will do literally _anything_ , because Will understands the representation of himself in Hannibal’s head.

When Hannibal met Will Graham in Jack’s office, he saw a tiger in a cage, and he immediately wanted to set it free. If that tiger had grown institutionalised, if it preferred to stay in society’s confinement where it was warm and well fed, then that was all the more reason to drag it out to see the wild by force and show it what a predator should be. And if the tiger turned around and bit off Hannibal’s arm after he yanked it into the world of tooth and claw, well, that’s what tigers do.

To place new restrictions on the magnificent creature he unleashed would be as blasphemous as the original caging, so Hannibal sets no limits on Will’s actions, _none_ , and the power in that knowledge is exhilarating, terrifying, and arousing to the point of derangement.

“Then I’ll make you,” Will tells him, and he shifts both of Hannibal’s wrists into his left hand, the other reaching for one of the many pillows arranged like a magazine photo at the head of the bed. His grip is purely symbolic – Hannibal could certainly break free if he wanted to, but he doesn’t and he won’t, and they both enjoy the game. 

He pushes the pillow beneath Hannibal’s hips, his lover lifting immediately to help him, and then he takes the lubricant from the nightstand, popping the cap one-handed.

He’s not bothering with foreplay – they’ve been soaping each other’s bodies in the shower for almost half an hour, and that was more than enough to make Will eager. It will be enough for Hannibal, as the flushed state of his erection testifies.

He maintains his hold on Hannibal’s arms, using his teeth to gently press on the tube, squeezing the contents over the fingers of his free hand. He flicks his head to let the tube drop to the bed beside them, and rubs his slippery fingertips around Hannibal’s entrance before pushing them inside.

Hannibal exhales long and slow, flexing his spine, his eyes locked with Will’s as he twists on his fingers.

Will raises his eyebrows at him, but he says and does nothing more. If Hannibal wants to put all the work in, Will sees no reason not to let him.

Apparently Hannibal does, because it’s not long before he comments, “I thought you had plans to ‘make me’. I’m noting very little indication of it.”

“Right now, it seems I’m making you squirm,” Will says with a sharp edge of amusement, but he bunches his fingers together and presses them deeper, and Hannibal’s eyes blink slow and his mouth opens in a circle of softened lips. He’s stunning, stretched out taut all through his arms and torso, the lines of his muscles pulled into stark definition, his cock hard and glistening for Will, his feet pushing down to lift his hips for him, and Will wants more now than the game.

He releases Hannibal’s wrists when he grabs for the lube and smears it at the head of his own cock, but Hannibal leaves his hands there among the pillows anyway. He’s never unaware of how he looks, clothed or naked, and Will sees the glint of it in his eyes while he waits and watches.

Will’s out of patience, and he’s done with waiting.

He lifts Hannibal’s legs over his arms and he presses in, a single smooth, sliding push, his eyes closing and his lips parting as the tight heat spreads to wrap around the whole length of his cock. There’s very little resistance, Hannibal relaxing for him, deliberately, consciously, wanting Will there, and it’s only at the end that there’s the barrier of the second ring of muscle. Will maintains the pressure until that opens too, and he slips in the final inch.

It’s amazing every time, the physicality of this, of nudging his way into someone else’s body, having them stretch and give for him, just enough to let him be there, enough to cling around him when he stays. Will holds himself all the way in, letting himself fully feel it in the surrounding blackness behind his eyelids, the intimacy of so much skin and muscle and damp heat. And when he opens his eyes, there’s Hannibal, and a whole other level of connection forged in their gaze, love and need and total understanding, and Will withdraws himself half way before pushing back in slowly to experience it all again, and again.

Hannibal’s legs tighten at Will’s shoulders, his ankles hooking round to emphasise the pressure. “Don’t hold anything back, Will. Whatever you feel, whatever you might need, you should embrace it and release it all.”

Will completes his stroke, measured and steady all the way in to the exquisite, gripping warmth of Hannibal, and then he pauses to glare down at him. “Can you not turn sex into a therapy session?”

Hannibal widens his eyes with the faintest hint of a smile, imperious and entirely unapologetic. “I wouldn’t, if I were sufficiently distracted.”

Which is an appallingly obvious way of goading Will into doing exactly what he just told him to do. Hannibal can be _so_ goddamn annoying. He’s not even pretending to be subtle. Will’s half tempted to fuck him excruciatingly slowly and drag it out forever just to make a point, but that’s not really what he wants to do, not this time. “Then let me distract you.” He dips and turns his head, pressing his lips to the soft, haired skin inside Hannibal’s calf, and then he nips down with his teeth, hard enough to cause redness and bruising. Hannibal inhales sharply, his muscles clenching down around Will’s cock in a way that’s absolutely _perfect._ And Will knows how to set about making him do it again.

Will’s aware Hannibal wasn’t new to being fucked before this relationship – he’s endlessly curious and a hedonist, he’s probably tried a dozen things sexually that Will wouldn’t even consider. But he’s certain that with Will is the first time Hannibal’s let himself be fucked without some ulterior controlling motive, indulging the sheer enjoyment of it because he _wants_ it.

Will wonders if Hannibal’s ever been able to truly lose himself in sex, or if he’s always been focussed on securing the mask, clinically assessing what his partner might be seeing in him. Whatever his history might be, Will takes enormous delight in fucking Hannibal out of his head, out of his guileful thoughts and into pure, visceral lust, and it delights him more because it’s so damn hard to do it.

Hannibal rarely lets go completely, and never easily.

Will sets a pace he knows he can sustain, moderate and steady with a little extra push on the stroke in. “I’m going to fuck you until you can’t think,” he tells him, and then he leans in close by his ear to clarify. “I’m going to fuck you until you can’t think about anything but me.”

“That’s a considerably easier goal.” Hannibal’s trying for casual, but he has to snatch an inhale half way through the sentence, and his eyelids twitch every time Will presses deep. Then his gaze fixes on Will and he removes one of his hands from the pillow to settle on Will’s bicep, and he says open and honest, “I find such is my state of mind with surprising frequency.”

Will’s own breath hitches then, as it does whenever Hannibal makes these transparent declarations of his love. And he knows the feeling in himself, when they’re twined together and everything’s Hannibal, his skin, his lips, his eyes, his intensity and focus, and it’s almost surprising that they have a life outside of a bed. He has a part of himself buried within this man, his lover, his love, and not just in the current, literal sense, because they’ve been dug deep into one another for years, and there were never any barriers that could stop it.

Will shoves into him, a little faster this time, a little harder, and it quivers through both of them. His head is alive with desire, his own lust tangled together with the black of Hannibal’s pupils and the arch of his spine, and he pauses long enough to drag his incisors over Hannibal’s forearm, leaving brief indents that glisten damply as they fade. Hannibal jumps beneath him, a whole body twitch that Will feels everywhere, but especially round his cock, and Will fucks into him again, Hannibal’s eyes exquisitely wide, his focus starting to scatter. Will sets his mouth to that same patch of sensitised skin, this time gripping flesh, seizing and tightening, and Hannibal stiffens beneath him, his breath breaking; Will clenches firmer, then pulls gently back, the skin scraping slow over the edges of his teeth, and Hannibal shudders and writhes everywhere except where Will’s holding him, his arm absolutely still and his fingers clamped into Will’s shoulder.

Hannibal isn’t the only one left with bruises when Will bites.

This is the one part of their love-making that isn’t reciprocal. Hannibal licks and kisses and sucks on every inch of Will’s skin, and as far inside him as he can get his tongue, but there’s never any hint of teeth. 

It’s not Will’s kink, but he wouldn’t be averse to trying it, and honestly he’s not found anything yet that Hannibal can’t make him turned on enough to enjoy, but Hannibal doesn’t go there, and Will understands why. Because Will loves enticing and pushing Hannibal beyond his own control, and if Hannibal started using teeth, he couldn’t be entirely sure each time where he’d _stop_.

Will laps and sucks thoroughly over the welt he’s left, feeling Hannibal relax and soften against and around him, and when he pulls back from his skin, Hannibal’s eyes have fallen closed into the sensation. Will smiles and resumes fucking him, measured and methodical, working Hannibal up towards his edge again, watching his breathing deepen and quicken, adding teeth for a brief surge of intensity, then stopping everything but gentle contact to ease him back away again before he gets too close.

It’s a cycle Will sometimes wants to draw out forever, seeing and feeling Hannibal responding to him so easily, Hannibal utterly unguarded and letting Will control his pleasure, letting himself be tuned and played like his own instruments. But Will’s entirely human, and his cock has limits independent of Will’s intentions, and eventually he has to let it all go, and just _fuck_ Hannibal and not stop. Hannibal shivers beneath him, and Will pushes faster, and Hannibal says, “Yes, like that,” huffed and clipped, bringing his other hand down from the pillow and applying it to his own erection. Will fucks him, and sees the heaving of his chest and the arch of his throat; he feels the rise of Hannibal’s orgasm hot in his own head, and he scratches his nails from Hannibal’s collarbone sharp along the length of his sternum, and Hannibal gasps out a short, inarticulate noise as he comes. 

Hannibal’s fingers grip into the bruises he’s already left in Will’s shoulder, and his muscles squeeze around Will’s cock, and Will’s still fucking him, still fucking him and wanting him like he’s never wanted _anything_ , panting with how much he needs it, until finally he crashes through into his own orgasm, shaking and pulsing and all the way inside Hannibal.

And when it finishes, he’s there, still with Hannibal, and he wants to kiss him, so he does, and it’s soft and slow and beautiful how their lips move and their noses brush. They stay that way until Will’s cock slips loose, and then he pushes off and flops to lie alongside Hannibal, sprawled and wholly content. Hannibal extracts the damp pillow from beneath him and discards it from the bed, rolling onto his side to face Will.

Hannibal looks at him like he’s the only person who has genuine worth in this entire world, and it’s an intrinsic truth, because as far as Hannibal’s concerned, he is. It’s _intoxicating_ , and Will’s fully aware it’s not a healthy mindset to let himself get drawn into, but the base reality is that nobody will ever love him, desire him, revere him the way that Hannibal does. The two of them are bound in a unique appreciation of the other that society can’t ever understand, and sex is one of the times it’s laid bare between them, exposed blatant and raw.

Will’s twenty minutes out of the shower and he’s already layered in sweat again, his cock sticky with lube and come, and he doesn’t care about any of that; he’s draped beside Hannibal, feeling the touch of him and the movement as he breathes. “I think you wore me out,” he says, smiling gently into his skin. 

“Then rest.” The affection carries in Hannibal’s voice too, and Will’s head settles between the pillow and his lover’s shoulder, and Hannibal’s not moving, not leaving the bed to clean the residue from himself or the sheets, he’s staying with Will.

The dogs are still outside, and he really shouldn’t leave them loose in the yard unsupervised for too long, but Dylan’s been here for over a month now and he’s well established in the pack. He won’t roam while the rest stay, and they’ll all be sprawled out near the house in the shade. Will decides they’ll be fine, just this once.

He closes his eyes, and listens to the quiet of the afternoon heat.

Will doesn’t actually sleep, but he dozes for a while, meandering back and forth between levels of consciousness, sometimes aware of Hannibal along his body, the sounds of his breath and slow shifting, other times sliding deeper into unfocussed relaxation. He’s not sure how long he drifts, lazy and essentially mindless, and it doesn’t matter, because he’s utterly comfortable and he doesn’t need to be anywhere else, only here.

When his eyes open long enough to clarify, the light hasn’t changed, but his brain always picks out the details, and the shadows have moved enough to be noticed. Hannibal hasn’t, still stretched alongside where Will’s memory left him, and he’s looking at Will now with carefully neutral features, weighing him for long seconds before he speaks.

“How do you feel?”

Will stretches out the full length of his spine, staring up at the ceiling, and considers the question. How does he feel?

The first thing he knows is what he doesn’t feel. He doesn’t feel anything negative. Not about what he did, which few people would have an issue with if the world was more honest about the practicalities, and not about the exhilarating pleasure he found in it, which might provoke a little more societal debate. There’s a mild ache through his body, through his muscles, and it’s the good kind, like when he’s been running with the dogs, and his brain’s swept clean by the wind.

“I feel content,” he decides eventually. “Satisfied.” It’s oddly close to when he got his bachelor’s. “Like I’ve achieved something I’ve been working towards for years.”

“That’s good,” Hannibal says gently. “You should remember this moment, Will. Remember how it feels right now, when the adrenaline is gone and you’re back in yourself and wholly balanced. This is the truth of it, of you.” He reaches out a hand to tease at a strand of Will’s hair curling by his forehead. “Your body has known what it needs since you reached adulthood. It was only waiting for your mind to conclude the same.”

Will rolls onto his side, lets himself flood into Hannibal’s calm eyes inches away, because killing isn’t the only thing Will enjoys that he spent years avoiding. “You were worried I might have regrets.”

Hannibal gives him a sharp look. “I may have harboured some reservations had there been a cliff nearby.” The look vanishes, and he’s back in the clinical veneer of the professional therapist. “Evolution occurs in stages. A life form can remain static for years, and then make a leap in progress almost overnight. Nobody can predict when those leaps will occur, or what will trigger the change.”

Will remembers sitting in a stolen car parked by a lake, watching the yachts ply the waves on a breezy day in mid spring. “I made my leap when I picked up a phone and called you.”

“You made one of them,” Hannibal acknowledges. “One of many. We never stop evolving, and we can never be truly complete.”

Will strokes his fingers over Hannibal’s ribs and along onto his chest. “I feel complete,” he says, because it’s true. “Here, now, with you. This is everything.”

Hannibal smiles at him, somewhat sadly. “It’s a wonderful feeling, Will. You should enjoy it while it lingers. You may find that next year it isn’t the same.”

Will rolls back onto his spine, exhaling air in a soft sigh, and he watches Hannibal from the corner of his eye. “Will you ever really trust me?”

Hannibal’s gaze is serious, and there’s no hesitation when he speaks. “I love you entirely, Will, and without reservation. There’s nothing I can regret about what loving you has brought me.”

“And you can’t forget it either,” Will says wryly.

Hannibal lowers his hand to stroke slow and deliberate across Will’s abdomen, in a line that curves from hip to hip. “No more than you can.”

“I don’t have to forget to believe there won’t be a repeat,” Will points out.

“And yet we both know there might be, if the circumstances arise.”

Will props himself onto his elbow, looking down at Hannibal and matching his sincerity. “Those circumstances aren’t random, Hannibal. We control them. Specifically, _I_ control them.” Mostly he does. Hannibal won’t hurt him unless Will betrays him, or he needs to give Will a story to spin, and the second of those he won’t even object to. 

He locks his eyes to Hannibal’s and stares him down, deliberate and unblinking. “I spent years trying not to love you. I tried to kill you. I tried to kill us both. I sold my house and moved away, I changed my career, and I married someone else, all because I wanted to stop thinking about you.” He raises his eyebrows in a blatant mockery of surprise. “Now, when I’m enthusiastically enjoying loving you, and everything your love entails, this is when you think it’s going to wear off?”

Hannibal gives Will an odd, questing look, and there’s an obvious pause before he speaks. “The twists and turns in the paths of your conscience have always been surprising to me, Will. I see no reason to assume I can predict their future directions any more accurately than I have in the past.” His lips quirk at one side. “As your boundaries of morality fluctuate, I can never be entirely sure what I might do that will transgress them.”

Killing Beverly transgressed Will’s boundaries. Killing Abigail smashed them into a thousand pieces, and Will’s here all the same. If Hannibal hasn’t already been persuaded by all the implications of that, Will explaining it isn’t going to help.

Hannibal trusted Will when he shouldn’t, and Will couldn’t. Now Will trusts Hannibal with the confidence of total knowledge, and Hannibal can’t.

Will drops back down flat onto the bed – lying propped on his arm like that sends an ache through his shoulder after only a few minutes these days. He turns his head to look at Hannibal, and considers the rest of this conversation, because the boundaries of more than morality have shifted between them, and he needs to establish the new ones. 

In the end, it feels like simple is best. “I won’t become you,” Will tells him. “Your designs are your own. I’ll never actively participate.” He participates after the fact, but Will draws the lines that keep him intact, and Hannibal appreciates what Will chooses to share.

Hannibal shifts closer and cups his hand to Will’s face, smiling soft and unsurprised. “You are a stunningly original masterwork, Will. It would be profanity to attempt to render you a mere copy of another canvas.” His voice lowers, falling to the register and tone that indicate his total sincerity, backing the fervour in his eyes. “I have only ever wanted you to be yourself, to be your whole self, without restriction, peerless and radiant. I would ask nothing more of you, except to allow me to be your witness.” His expression doesn’t change, but the spark of levity is back in his look and his words. “And should there be any doubt on the matter, I will always be delighted to participate, whenever and to whatever degree you wish.” 

Will smiles and reaches out, crossing their wrists to match Hannibal’s touch with his own fingers on Hannibal’s jaw. “I’ll always want your full participation.” Maybe in a few more years, Hannibal will believe him.

Will enjoys killing alone, he knows that, though it’s hard to say that he ever has, since Hobbs. Hannibal wasn’t in the room when he killed Randall Tier, but he was a far stronger presence in Will’s head than the person he beat into an unmoving lump of blood and meat. 

Killing with Hannibal is simply better; to take that driving jolt of power and justice and vicious, unyielding _glee_ , and share it with someone who knows, who sees him, and brazenly covets him… It’s the single most astonishing experience of Will’s existence, and its proven repeatability is a temptation he won’t try to reject. He _wants_ it.

It’s a relief to find he doesn’t crave it. 

He’s lived more than half his life in fear of just what his violence might turn out to be if he ever chose to release it. It seems he’s not an addict. He enjoys it immensely, but he’s not about to go stalking the streets, looking for excuses. Apparently murder’s just another hobby to bring some gratification to his life, like fishing.

Now that he’s done it, in full awareness and without excuses, it’s no longer this _thing_ creeping beneath his life. He’s dragged the monster that lurked in the depths out into the sunlight, and he’s discovered there is no monster. There’s only himself, and he’s the same person he’s always been.

It’s an oddity in both of them – despite all of the changes they’ve twisted into one another over the years, they somehow remain inherently intact. Will leans in to press their lips together, soft and meaningful, because the only fulfilment he genuinely needs is here, in this bed, and beside him every day. He’ll go the rest of his life without killing if the circumstances don’t align (they will, he knows that, humans are too numerous and too brutal for their destruction not to intersect with his life), but he’ll use every ability he has to keep Hannibal within his reach. If the law tries to separate them, he’ll create the means to get him back. He’s done it twice before.

Anyone who gets in the way of that is making their own choice.

And if Hannibal can never wholly trust him, well, he had no illusions that this relationship or any other would be perfect when he walked in the door. What they have is already more than Will could have realistically hoped to sustain.

He draws back gently from the kiss, still suffused with that delightful laziness and not really up for another round of sex just now; he’s content just to look and touch and love. Hannibal shares his mood, stroking fingertips light over Will’s shoulder in widening circles, watching Will with those eyes that never seem to look away. “I believe I’ll go swimming in the lake tomorrow morning,” he says.

He hasn’t, these last few weeks. He’s been here for Will, whenever he needed him, and now their routine can return to normal, to their simple domestic life woven around each other.

Will pictures Hannibal slicing his way through the water, muscled and sleek, forcing it to shape itself around him as he carves a path entirely of his own choosing, and he smiles and brushes another kiss against his lips, rests his hand on his chest over his heart. 

“I think I’ll come with you.”


	6. Epilogue

_But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes._  
\-- Oscar Wilde, _De Profundis_

  


They are very different killers.

Hannibal is ruthless, methodical and cold. His breathing doesn’t quicken, his heart rate doesn’t change. The people he kills mean nothing to him – their bodies after death are of greater value than their pathetic, wasted lives. Hannibal is superior and entirely calm, above their petty concern for their own skin, and he’s not distracted from his work by any protests they might have about the transformation. Hannibal is superior to everyone – everyone except Will Graham, the only person fit to share his world and his life and see the artistry in what he does.

Will kills in a righteous fury, in a pyre of adrenaline, hating and joyous. He isn’t frenzied – he can plan, and he is careful, he won’t be caught – but while the forethought is systematic, the act itself leaves him panting with eyes blown wide, aware of every stray drop of blood that splashes through the air and cools on his skin, sensation intensified above even the level of sex. The people he kills mean _everything_ , their indisputable evil the trigger for the savage rapture he finds in squashing it from the earth, in protecting the innocents of the world from their depravities.

Will sees both of them, and he knows both of them; he feels their disparate attitudes to murder juxtaposed in his head, but only later, because at the time he kills there’s no space in his head for anything except his own actions, his own intensity, and that’s a sensation rare enough to be extraordinary. 

Will knows himself, and he knows Hannibal, and it’s their differences that make them so very effective.

When looked at objectively, he acknowledges that they don’t make sense, on any level. If Hannibal wanted a companion to kill with, logic says he should have chosen Tobias Budge, the murderer who shared his precision taste for art, who auditioned for the role, who would have been Hannibal’s exact match. 

Hannibal didn’t want his match. He found Budge predictable and tedious, and would have executed him without a thought if not for Will’s accidental intervention. Instead he killed him with the underlying thread of anger, in the belief he had harmed _Will. ___

__Hannibal was attracted not to his match, but to his opposite, to Will Graham, whose chaotic excess of emotions dragged out Hannibal’s own that had been submerged for thirty years. Will brought _feelings_ back into the life of a man who’d forgotten what it was like to have them, while Hannibal taught Will that to temper his emotions he had to understand and accept them, that for as long as he squashed them down deep, they would only cause suffering and nightmares._ _

__Somehow in their differences, their extremes, they find a centre, and a stability they can only have through each other. And while they would be highly effective killers separately (and Hannibal still is), their contrasting approaches to murder expose and then fill every gap or flaw in the planning._ _

__In the end, there are no differences. They both believe that the world is improved by the absence of a certain type of person. It’s only a matter of degrees between them, where exactly they draw the line in who deserves to die, and who gets a pass into the next decades of their life. Will isn’t inclined towards hypocrisy – Hannibal’s selection process may be less restrictive than his own, but that doesn’t make Will better._ _

__Will kills, and he loves a killer, and they’re not the same. The world won’t see their differences and Will can honestly say he doesn’t care._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that’s all folks. I’m finally done, a year, a month, and some days after I sat on a plane frantically scribbling the first conversations between Jack and Will that grew into ‘Out of the Depths.’ At that point, I thought ‘Out of the Depths’ would be a one off, and getting Will to a place where he could make a choice would be the end of it. It turns out I had to follow Will through all of his choices before I could stop.
> 
> Bryan Fuller said that after the fall would be when Will Graham’s journey started to get really interesting, and apparently my brain agreed. We will likely never get to see Bryan Fuller’s vision for season four, so we share those of a few thousand fangirls, and this was mine.
> 
> Thank you, Bryan Fuller, for creating some of the most fascinating, crazy, inspirational series on television, and in particular for Hannibal, which rekindled my writing bug after a seven year hiatus. You gave me something truly special.
> 
> Oh, and I have a tumblr account now. I'm tiggymalvern there too, because I always am, everywhere.


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